Yes, apparently he died last week. The person said to be behind the phrase we are the 99% at the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was an interesting character.
My question would be: do anarchists really work as professors at the London School of Economics? And Yale? Aren't you a 'system man' at that point?
I suspect that if an anarchistan would be created within a lifetime it would 'revert' to some other well known political framework, either a democracy or a dictatorship.
If there was an anarchistan in recent history it was a probably Somalia and even there you now find a regular government.
A more appropriate example of "anarchistan" would probably be Catalonia during the civil war in the 1930s. It has been written and discussed by Orwell, Bookchin and many others. Your point is well taken though, at the end it did function as part of a "regular" democratic government before being crushed in the civil war both by Soviet backed communists and Franco.
Well, I suspect that David Graeber, who quietly self-proclaimed himself as one of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street, was one of those people designed to make 'anarchistan' a distant reality. He would take the energy invested in him and then faceplant before the finish line. By say, proposing that the left wing should be voted for.
He was in support of Corbyn etc - this is to say he was happy to work within the system. You might say that this is a pragmatic view - but really he represented a hard left view.
Anarchism is, by definition, no-leaders. Self-determination. Neither communism nor a libertarian position. So I think in practise he was in contradiction of the beliefs he purported to hold.
Libertarianism was conceived by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, who first used the term to call Proudhon, the father of anarchism a mere 'moderate anarchist, liberal but not libertarian'.
For about a century libertarianism was exclusive a far left ideology including mostly anarchists and libertarian Marxists.
We all have to live in this system, it's unrealistic to think all anarchists should be ideologically pure and live in the woods off the land like Kaczynski.
I believe thinking and writing and getting these ideas into the mainstream can be a form of praxis. As Zizek says, sometimes the most revolutionary thing to do is nothing at all.
Absolutely. The system is pervasive and we have to live within it.
But should you embrace it? While Yale and LSE are no doubt great institutions, to my mind they are also up there as educators of those who go on to become the system's top managers.
Hotbed is right. The institution literally force grows radicalism. And yet, it is considered a top university.
The reason is that it helps to present what is in fact a false dichotomy. The radical thought they support is that within the Overton window. Nothing that would really shake up the ruling elite is expressed there. Like CNN and Fox news.
It's a good question. Not specifically about the London School of Economics, because that was started by Marxist Fabian Society members 125 years ago, but about a lot of academia.
Of course anarchism is a resistance to rule by domination, not to systems and procedures. Some universities are no doubt power centers, though.
edit: anarchism means "no ruler." It's usually painted by people who think rulers are necessary as something like amorphism i.e. "no shape."
> do anarchists really work as professors at the London School of Economics? And Yale?
I know a banker who is communist. It does not mean that he behaves like a communist in his actions, but he does in his words. From my perspective, he takes the best (or the worst) of both worlds: the quality of life of a very rich man who can afford living in the most expensive places and whatever leisure he wants, and the ability to punch down on the "lesser" people around him from his morally higher stand-point. Never under-estimate people's hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance, especially when what is at stake is exerting power over other people's lives. One can always find a way to rationalize one's crappy behaviour to try to lower the cognitive dissonance after the fact.
That's an incontinent position to hold and he must have high cognitive dissonance of schizophrenia. Except if he is duplicitously self-serving, ie happy to receive the payments but not the opprobrium that comes with a high paying system position.
You'd be very surprised how many socialists and communists there are in banking.
On one hand one of the things Proudhon and Marx agreed on was that driving down the cost of credit is an inherently radical act - the cheaper credit becomes the weaker the hold of employers over employees becomes, as it becomes easier to start for yourself.
On the other hand in finance you see the mechanisms at work laid bare.
Nowhere else than in finance and in far left groups have I seen the same extent of shared fear (AND optimism - people tend to be unaware the Communist Manifesto starts with fanboy-level praise for the advances brought by capitalism) about the long term societal effects of automation for example.
I'm not surprised. They see themselves as doing the best for themselves - that's anarchy, right? But they are prepared to harm others to do it. But even so, they want to be thought well of.
I guess bankers and communists share the idea of looking at 'the people' as a group to be governed and managed. Both are wedded to the system. I think communistic thinking is the idea that seems to have won, and (technocratic) governance is going to proceed with that as its basis.
He said, "If you and I can agree that we will both do our share of the work of the
world" -- that's the work 'round the Joe Hill House -- "If you and I agree that we
will only take what we need and put back what we can; if you and I can agree that
we'll care for the afflicted: and mostly, if you and I can agree that we won't hurt
anybody" -- all the things you can't get from the boss and from the state -- "then we
can begin to build between us that voluntary combination and get the work of the
world done without the boss and without the state."
Well, I've said that t'so many young people, especially lately, who get this idea
that anarchy is some kind of nihilism: "Oh you can't tell me what to do". No!
Anarchy, you've got to tell _yourself_ what to do because you've got to learn to become
your own best government. And believe me, you can do it better and cheaper than they
can.
I (used to, pre-covid) see daily plenty people cutting bus lanes, so these exist, and what you going to do to protect society from them? even a stern look is not the anarchist way.
most sport teams have a captain and a trainer and most volunteer forces are under supervision of more experienced staff around here. sure they don't strictly command the squad, but they're the one responsible for organizing participant to minimize internal and external friction
that capitalism is unfair is so generic it's extremely disingenuous to make that critique as a sign of anarchism
there's quite a logical jump from "two wrongs don’t make a right" to "abolish the criminal justice system", which isn't about punishment to begin with in most societies.
"Pretty much every achievement has been based on cooperation and mutual aid" - pretty much most of the contemporary technological jump came from wwii, and the modern technological jump came from private holdings competing and one upping one another.
"Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil" uh, there's psychopathology that need to be cured; how many people submitted to rehab vs how many people were forced into?
"certain sorts of people are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters? " of curse I wouldn't call them "inferior" and "ruling", but some people require continuous assistance or guidance. this question has been loaded with negative term to cause a certain predefined answer to seem the only right answer. ask yourself is someone with dementia would need a tutor to manage their finances instead and help them trough surviving in decent condition, and suddenly the answer is not as much black and white.
hope this is because it's a very short essay to a large introductory text, because otherwise is severely lacking both in arguments and the logic by which what's there has been built.
The standard reply is that social pathologies are caused by a pathological system. In that way it's not much different than Marxist apologetics. Unfalsifiable utopianism, and frankly, naive about human nature. There's just so much hand waving when it comes to concrete proposals. Blueprints? like what? Stalin himself would have been a fan a Parecon. I'll miss David. Debt was a really interesting book. But, if this is anarchism, our most visible anarchist activists today didn't get the message. We all practice Communism at the level of a family. And we all practice anarchism in a somewhat free society. But not all social systems scale. I do wonder why my favorite anarchists like Graeber and Chomsky and Zinn found their homes in academic institutions where most of their peers are fully capable of governing themselves. Call me cynical, but scratch a cynic and you'll find a disillusioned idealist, they say. It seems to me that if you scratch a social anarchist and you'll find a crypto totalitarian.
Most people do behave "decently" in this sense. However some do not. Under an open system, these outliers will eventually eat the decent. It strikes me this is likely the exact journey we have come on to arrive where we are. We have created a structure in which the monsters can eat a certain proportion of us in order that we may not be eaten.
It’s even worse than that. Most people believe that they act decently. But to paraphrase Feynman, the easiest person to deceive is ourselves. No one (or at least vanishingly few) believe that they are the villain in their own narrative. And yet evil persists in the world.
I'm not sure that is true. While I don't know (or rather, I don't know that I know) anyone who's actually a villain of some sort, I know quite a few people in SEO affiliate marketing. Their businesses generally don't add any value, they buy links, use cheap copy writers that produce mediocre content often full of factual errors, Google eats it up like it was the best thing ever (because of the links they bought), people get directed to their sites from search queries and buy at the shops the recommend. They essentially inject themselves between Google and the shop, but they're not adding any value - if anything, they're reducing value (by influencing buying decision with lies - not just marketing "women will find you more attractive if you have this car", actual lies as in "this product can do X" when it can't).
And they know it, and when you ask them about it, they'll happily say so. They don't believe that they are providing a service, and they're not telling that to themselves either. Why do they do it, then? Because they get money for it. They are well aware that they aren't adding value, but they're doing it because it pays.
I don't believe that e.g. a thief, thugs or fraudster go around thinking they do nothing wrong or that they act decently. They know, they are fully aware that they are a net-negative to society. What I find more interesting in that regard is this: do they realize they are abnormal in that regard, or do they believe that everybody acts like them?
I think people rationalize. Stealing from faceless corporations who treat customers poorly is OK. Stealing from people who are “too rich”. People who “need to be taught a lesson.” People who create a narrative of their own victimhood.
I would say about the SEO affiliate marketers, that they would tell you that they’re no different than other marketers, they just operate in a specialized space.
That article doesn't actually support your argument. The dictatorship of the small minority is a case of simple accommodation, some people want things much more strongly than others and those things are not very costly to the majority, so they get universally accepted to reduce friction. It doesn't mean that intolerance wins, just that democratic societies are accommodating of minor but strongly desired things for certain groups.
The fundamental nature of politics is that it’s about relationships of power- how power is exercised, who has power, who doesn’t, and what the relationship is between people or groups of people. Whenever one person or group of people is above another in some kind of power hierarchy, the same kind of dynamic develops, no matter whether it’s in a corporate office or medieval Europe or anywhere else- its always the same. The people on the bottom will always display resentment and resistance towards those who have power over them, because nobody likes having explicit or implicit violence threatened on them and being exploited or told what to do. The person or people on top will always display contempt and fear towards those underneath, contempt because in order to justify being on top one has to believe that they are superior or more deserving in some way, and fear because on some level they know that they are outnumbered by a lot of very angry people. They know that the sword of Damocles hangs over their heads. The discourse of the political right wing is therefore always going to be dominated by both contempt and fear, for exactly those reasons. The contempt manifests in talking about a “culture of victimhood” and “welfare queens” and “black on black violence” and “snowflakes” and the fear manifests in calls for law and order, more aggressive policing, border walls and increased military funding. But the source of the discord is the power hierarchy itself, whether it be racial or class or gender or whatever, and until that is abolished the same poisonous political dynamic will persist. It cannot be papered over by advocating for everybody to “just get along” or “give peace a chance”; that’s just one more way to tell the people at the bottom that they need to stop complaining and accept their situation. Even if the discord calms down for a while, it will inevitably bubble back to the surface again as resentment and anger build up, and fear and contempt to meet it. Only equality can resolve the conflict.
“Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”
My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
How many hardened sociopaths can an anarchy sustain before it either collapses or becomes a mockery of its own self-direction and mutualism principles?
You should read about how Anarchy treats it's mentally ill before you decide they don't have a solution to that simple problem. The way we treat mentally ill in Capitalism is a crime.
How many hardened sociopaths can any system take before the same? Look at America right now, with a narcissistic psychopath installed at the highest level of a supposed democracy.
Systems built on mistrust of human nature (i.e. checks and balances) can take more.
The amount he hasn't been able to do in that position is testament to that. Imagine if the US had been an anarchy instead and he'd amassed enough same-thinking folk to take it over?
Is it not a good thing if there are no structures in place for those people to abuse to oppress others? We've seen states captured by murderous lunatics time and time again. It seems having structures in place for those kinds of people to abuse has worked very poorly.
As long as the concentration of power in the hands of nation states have been the foundation for most of the worst mass murders in human history, it seems quaint to worry that people arguing for making power shared and collective rather than allowing it to be concentrated will do worse.
Power is concentrated and delegated top down. That's the point. If I want to withhold consent to be policed a certain way, I can't, even if I only e.g. live and interact with people who similarly want to withhold consent (nobody would suggest that I would have the right to unilaterally dictate the rules if I interact with others who don't share my views).
So the problem is that the power is not collective other than the power to vote for who the power will be concentrated with. There's a massive disconnect there where, e.g. if we go by US elections, about half the population at any point are ruled by a system they have not consented to.
That is not collective power, at least not collective and shared power of the people, but of a majority at most (even assuming representatives do what their voters want them to, which is also a dicey proposition). Nearly every government in the world tries to limit this tyranny of the majority by legally protected rights to secure the minority against government overreach too, but the fact that they need to demonstrates how flawed this model is.
You assume a power vacuum, but nobody is suggesting a power vacuum, but power mediated by consent, negotiation and bottom up delegation rather than top down coercion.
As long as you're assuming a power vacuum, you're arguing against a strawman.
We have power mediated by consent. You cannot have individuals opting out of a societal system of laws or murderers will do just that.
> If I want to withhold consent to be policed a certain way, I can't, even if I only e.g. live and interact with people who similarly want to withhold consent
We have power enforced without any of kind of consent. We get to vote for our rulers, and ~half of us get ignored any given period. There's no consent there.
Your example of murderers just reinforce that you don't understand the ideology you're arguing against, and opt for arguing against strawmen instead.
You can have people opting out easily without the extremes you suggest. E.g. a murderer can not reasonably "opt out" because they "opted in" the moment they engaged with someone else without their consent.
Again the key is consent, bottom up organisation and voluntary association, not relinquishing all means of protection.
A more reasonable example would be that it is coercive to deny others the freedom to choose what they ingest. Even if it's drugs you don't like. If you want to organise on a small scale a drug free commune, that'd be reasonable. If you try to expand that to a country, it becomes coercive and unjust be nature of forcing massive upheavals of peoples lives, and enforced monopolies over large swathes of land if they don't want to live like that.
Which brings us to this:
> What do you think countries are?
Structures I have no ability to withhold consent from without uprooting my life and/or subjecting myself to another, which unjustly claim monopoly on power over large parts of land. Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
The coercive nature of the relationship means there's a power balance that precludes any reasonable claim of consent.
This highlights the typical left/right view of de facto rights vs. de jure rights. The ability to leave a country confers me de jure rights to extricate myself from the rule of a given state. But de facto I have no ability to find anywhere that provides the freedoms I want, because nowhere exist where they are available. A right wing view is that the existence of the de jure right means I am free. The left wing view is that the de facto barriers to achieving the goal means that I am oppressed, because real world abilities trump theoretical possibilities any day.
> A more reasonable example would be that it is coercive to deny others the freedom to choose what they ingest.
It's an excellent example to consider, since vaccines are in that category and some people's free choice to not take vaccines impacts the health of people who cannot take them for reasons of medical complication and now cannot rely on herd immunity to keep them safe.
> Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
While I like those ideologies for their moral purity, I think they fail in practicality for the reason you've just described: they're unstable. Another group with organized use of force and a willingness to take and hold territory displaces them, and then they get to define their actions as just in their moral framework, regardless of what the libertarians think.
It was an exaggeration. But there are enough humans who are not interested in fair behaviour, but only getting ahead at almost any cost, that the idea of an unregulated world is laughable.
I don't even think many would, the problem is that it only takes a few. The damage that a dedicated antisocial hyperminority can do to a society that lacks rules and enforcement of said is significant... Even more so in an age where technology acts as a force multiplier.
The idea of how an anarchic society would be run is that you would need strong social norms, and people willing to use violence in order to prevent authority from rising, which effectively deals with small antisocial minorities.
And where in the world has it played out like this?
Instead of examples of peaceful anarchism, the history of the world is full of examples showing that those with the will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias, become warlords...
Sure, the Zapatistas, the Apoists, and a few indigenous anarchist groups.
Forming gangs and militias is difficult when the status quo is good for most people resulting the majority being willing to use violence to avoid being ruled by gangs and warlords.
The written history, the recent past. We can observe settlements from the past but know very little about the time before farming because there were few or no settlements, which is not actually that long ago. This "will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias" might only be because we ran out of resources and space and shifted from "mother earth provides" to "this is mine". At least, that's what a book I'm reading hints at, but again, it acknowledges very strongly just how little we know.
There isn't a going back to before possessions, obviously, but I'm also not convinced that a majority of us are dishonest by nature. Certainly enough that we need laws and enforcement, but what would happen if we manage to get to a point where there are enough resources for everyone and automatic systems do most of the necessary work like making food? Do we still need the same level of security just to protect ourselves from a few sadists or could we have a more anarchistic society? Can we embrace some of the ideas that those unhappy with our current society propose?
Honestly I feel like most of this discussion is a definition issue. One person will say "anarchism is great" or "that isn't what anarchism is, you have to picture it this other great way" whereas another will make different assumptions and conclude it's ridiculous. It's a bit like being in a communistic country talking about switching to capitalism and arguing that human nature's greed can't be trusted or something. Rather, it might make more sense to propose incremental changes rather than talk about a completely different society where (if we're all being honest) nobody really has any friggin' clue if it'll increase median happiness.
One thing that is clear from history is that forming groups is bad. Making this about us vs them (anarchists vs <insert other group>), left versus right, etc.) inherently causes disagreement when I think most everyone's goal is increasing the common good.
> One thing that is clear from history is that forming groups is bad.
Dividing groups and pitting them against each other is bad. Forming groups was the innovation that set our primate ancestors apart from their solitary mammal peers. None of us are as strong as all of us.
Humans vs competing species is different from humans vs humans, though. I think it's within our capacity to learn to do only the latter, provided there are enough resources to at least have a reasonable living. We'll need to make the 'western' lifestyle require only one earth for everyone.
This behaviour is most definitely promoted by capitalism, so I wouldn't be so fast to make it a general principle. In fact, all proof shows that humans are extremely cooperative and social when the going gets tough or disaster strikes.
I think it's really telling that this disaster-anarchism argument comes up so regularly. The question isn't how society functions during a state of exception, it's how it functions on day 2 after the excitement is over when things go back to normal.
It's like all other revolutions having failed the revolution has now been outsourced to hurricanes and floods. if you want to argue that capitalism or the status quo or whatever is bad, make the case how anarchism functions on an ordinary, boring day, that is to say how it organises regular life, that is the relevant question.
> humans are extremely cooperative and social when the going gets tough or disaster strikes.
2020 being a great example.
Jesus, this whole discussion is such a shitshow. Every time I hear about anarchism I keep wishing someone would explain to me how it all works, I expected a lot from HN users, but all I keep reading is fairy tails with obvious holes the size of Mount Everest. Like, did anyone even consider to think how you'd resolve the obvious market fallacies (which, despite the name, have nothing to do with capitalist markets, but simply with humans / rational self-interested agents).
Anarchists obviously don’t think this will come about by itself, they simply believe that it is possible to organize society in such a way that the statement above holds true. Anarchists will generally argue that todays society prevents that from being the case (at least to a large enough degree).
The details of all this (strategies, how to make it work, etc) is at the core of a lot of anarchist theory.
That's what I find so weird about most criticisms of Anarchism. Anarchists like nothing more than building systems and methods, then seeing how they work or could be improved. The only way to differentiate different forms of anarchism is through the systems they think would be most effective, and the methods they think would be most effective to bring them about.
It's just a lot harder to build peer-to-peer systems than centralized ones, although peer-to-peer systems are ultimately the most resilient.
Yeah, it's really funny how anarchism has this reputation for disorganisation. The anarchists I've met are super nerds about what is good democratic process going down to intricate details of how it all should be organised.
I guess there is probably also a big difference here between actual anarchists and people who merely sympathise with anarchism (like myself), possibly mainly because they have an anti-authoritarian inclination (which alone, an anarchist does not make).
> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law?
What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.
> It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
Above you said it was "demonstrable" but now seem to be settling for saying it's somehow self-evident.
...
Fwiw I don't personally agree with the quoted statement, or rather I agree with only a narrow interpretation of it.
I don't think individuals are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion in all situations without having to be forced to. I do think groups are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without external force, given certain conditions: anarchism in my mind is about local* law enforcement rather than external.
Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.
*By "local" I just mean internal/within proximity to the individual
Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.
> What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.
Well, we don't have mass rape, looting, or murder. One really needs to compare scale. Democracy seems to be a horrible system, and indeed the worst system, except for all the others (paraphrasing Churchill).
> Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.
You're missing scale. SMALL self-regulating organizations do very well. The key condition isn't just about removing external incentives, but also about scale.
Once you're at some scale, you're guaranteed to have a few psychopaths who work to game the system to personal benefit. A key thing about small-scale is everyone can say "Adolf is a jerk. Let's swing clear of him." Large scale, he takes over Germany, and onto the world!
Likewise, large-scale, you're missing social incentives. Small scale, I can say "I won't steal from you, because you'll think I'm a jerk." Large-scale, try leaving your wallet in the train in almost any major city for 10 minutes.
Tribal culture was pretty good on isolated islands. It didn't go Lord of the Flies. That only happened at scale.
I've seen largish organizations sustain this for maybe a half-decade or decade, but never longer. At some point, game-theoretical organizational models take over, and things never go back.
> Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.
ummm, both of your specific examples are actually examples of those with power abusing it.
> ummm, both of your specific examples are actually examples of those with power abusing it
Precisely. Those are examples of how, unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
The whole history of progress in political systems could be oversimplified as a search for laws, structures, checks, and balances to prevent this from happening. In the absence of engineered ones, you revert into anarchy, which leads to individuals amassing power and abusing it.
Things like Democratic Structures, the Magna Carta, and the US Constitution were steps forward to prevent that. Heck, the rigid hierarchy of Ancient Egypt did better than the anarchy which came before. As a primitive form of government, it was incredibly inequitable, but you had far less theft and violence than before. That invention -- explicit governance structures and codified laws -- even in that form, allowed modern civilization.
> Those are examples of how, unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
They will always do this? What is the source of this knowledge? And I ask that in the literal sense, not rhetorically.
I would say it's the fact that despite humanity's initial state being anarchy, all over the world human society has developed along basically these same patterns.
If someone is allowed to amass power to to abuse others, it is not anarchy.
You seem to assume anarchy implies no rules, but fundamentally to ensure minimal rules the bare minimum is to shut down any attempt at aggression against others.
An anarchist would argue, however, that protecting society against aggression does not require a top down state.
There was a recent attempt in Capital Hill at creating an area where everyone was equal, and as I recall a bunch of people seized power and went on to cause havoc and violence...
How do you prevent someone from building too much power? Well, you need to cap their reserves of soldiers/hardware/supplies. In order to do that you inherently need a stronger entity to enforce those caps...
An early premise of anarchist movements was that there are already someone trying to grab too much power, namely nation states. As such a large proportion of anarchist thought is down to how to organise and build bottom up structures with the intent of matching and being able to counter and destroy the power structures of nation states.
Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.
> Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.
Not unwilling. Unable. Fighting against something rarely works to bring about productive change. Fighting for something is harder, but often does.
The French revolution brought about sweeping change across Europe in its aftermath. That the changes it brought were unpredictable is true, and that it took an aftermath that lasted for a long time to resolve the fallout too. But to suggest it didn't bring productive change is ludicrous.
And Animal Farm is fiction.
But if you're so sure it is unable, then it doesn't matter then - in that case these systems will never come to fruition, and so debating them is pointless.
Your history is confused. You're confusing the French Revolution and the American Revolution. Change in Europe came primarily due to a working example in America. America was, in a very real sense, a beacon of hope and freedom for the rest of the world.
The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive. It led to a lot of unpredictable chaos AND it slowed productive change. An ill-executed plan is a setback. You can see what the example of the USSR did to Communism.
I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
No, I'm not at all confusing the French Revolution and the American "revolution" (I always find it funny Americans consider it a revolution in the first place - it was nothing of the sort, it was a secession war that did nothing to upset the economic or class balance within American society).
While the American revolutionary war provided some inspiration, the path towards revolution in France involved political changes that had been brewing for a century, and its historically illiterate to suggest it was all, or mostly, a result of a "working example".
It also happened on the backdrop of the dissemination of enlightenment ideas from writers like the Genevan Rosseau, the French Voltaire, and English writers like Locke, who equally were an inspiration in America.
1789 also happened to a backdrop of some of the most severe inflation France had seen, after decades of social upheaval, for example. The revolution was a matter of survival for a lot of people, not middle classes upset over minor taxation, and it changed not just France, but Europe and large parts of the world.
Numerous countries, far outside Europe, still have legal codes incorporating large aspects of the Napeolonic Code that codified a large amount of the principles coming from the revolution, for example [1].
> The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive.
This is just pure fiction.
It's clear there's no point in debating this.
> I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.
I really think you need to do some reading on what anarchism actually is before writing criticisms. It really isn't the thing you think it is.
> unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
Yes. Anarchism is about putting in place those constraints (via systems design rather than external enforcement since the latter requires amassing power in order to act as enforcer).
> Things like Democratic Structures...
You lost me here. Anarchism is democratic.
You seem to think anarchism is something emergent that existed before rules. It isn't. Anarchism is rules without centralising enforcement, not absence of rules. Feudalism in particular is the direct opposite of anarchism.
Please at least Google the term before you go and further.
Well, before my first post I reread the Wikipedia article.
I will mention there's a bit of a dance with definitions with some ideologies which I find irksome. This is true here. Yes, there is some definition which can dodge any specific criticism, but those definitions aren't mutually coherent or consistent. You either get problem A or problem B. You can't use one definition to address one and another definition for the other.
This is common of many ideologies. I've found this to be especially true when talking with feminists. They bounce between a push for equality (for example, abolishing employment structures which favor men), and a push for changes which favor women (for example, feminists in divorce law push for policies which favor the mother). When they get caught in a contradiction, the definition changes like a squiggly fish. That lack of rational, critical conversation translates into ineffective tactics, and a failure to achieve change.
Ya' gotta pick one definition. Then we can talk about it.
Since, ironically, you'd like me to find authoritative references before I talk more, here's one I found on Google:
anarchy
1a : absence of government
b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority the city's descent into anarchy
c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
2a : absence or denial of any authority or established order anarchy prevailed in the war zone
b : absence of order : disorder not manicured plots but a wild anarchy of nature— Israel Shenker
I think it is more complicated than that, although I agree in some circumstances laws deter bad behavior. However many laws are passed to protect the bad behavior of the powerful. Moreover, under better environments people may organize themselves effectively with only cultural norms - not laws. Think happy families living together without any laws governing their behavior or tribes with cultural norms protecting a common grazing area.
As mentioned upthread though, there's a lot of reason to believe these self-regulating small societies work specifically when they're small - once you get to the point where you don't have a personal connection with everyone in your tribe, the social cost of acting out of the established norm decreases - instead of your close friends shunning you, maybe a few strangers think you're an asshole.
That assumes that the presence of lawful order makes things better, which is sort of the whole question this article is about.
You can construct a pretty good argument that, say, absent the structures of "lawful order" around which large corporations grow, fewer people would be driving hours to work each day, drinking water out of plastic bottles, flying across the country on business trips, producing pesticides in Bhopal, piling up ammonium nitrate in Beirut, etc. I think most of us as individuals could lead happy and fulfilling lives and contributing to the advancement of humanity without any of that.
"I think most of us as individuals could lead happy and fulfilling lives and contributing to the advancement of humanity without any of that."
Your assumption is that we led happy and fulfilling lives before what we now call society, which is false. Bad harvest years would routinely decimate communities. Hunger also drove people to steal from others, many times violently (kill, rape, and ransack), and in the best case where they only stole your food, you were now left to starve because a famine affects everyone, and the victims were already on rations as it were.
Local spots of violence in the struggle for the very few resources that we had were very common place. As societies evolved, such conflicts for resources became more necessarily more complex (think bands, think small militias, think city-state armies, think all out war).
The main misconception I tend to see people have is that they somehow believe that our current condition is somehow different from the condition we were in. As if society was imposed on us and we became bad. We are society. Be it a community of ten or a community of a thousand. Good an evil are both sides of the same coin, it's just our nature.
> Your assumption is that we led happy and fulfilling lives before what we now call society, which is false.
No, that's not my assumption, and I'm confused why you think it is. I'm simply saying that I, right now, in our current state of society, am not driving a car to work or buying water bottles in my current happy and fulfilling life, and the only reason I did that previously (and might do so in the future) is because a corporation backed by our current form of government made it so that I needed to do that to have a happy and fulfilling life.
I didn't say anything about the state of humanity before modern society. You make some good points, but I don't think they have much to do with this particular discussion. You may well be raising a different good objection to anarchism, but it's not the objection I'm responding to.
Maybe. Or maybe a band of like-minded people get together, arm themselves and take over the "individuals leading happy and fulfilling lives", declaring themselves monarchs and killing all those who oppose them.
Sure, that's a reasonable objection to anarchism, but that's also not particularly relevant to the question of whether individuals on their own will harm our planet, I think?
But laws also enable rights for minorities, which the majority isn't free to trample over or ignore. To take one example that's particularly close to my heart, laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act can compel corporations to make their products and services accessible even if they'd rather not. I think I and many of my friends wouldn't have nearly as happy and fulfilling lives if not for that.
> Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order.
Law isn't a basis for morality, and there's a lot to be said for how present (capitalist, consumerist) systems promote un-sustainability, despite many on an individual level rejecting those systems.
The line you quoted doesn't say that people will act reasonably, but rather that they are capable of acting reasonably.
The interesting (and massive) problem is figuring out why some people act unreasonably in the same situation as someone else who doesn't. If it's something that can be addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government without the need for so many laws simply by making sure everyone is treated fairly and not left in a position where unreasonable actions are a solution to their immediate problems.
> addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government
The (most likely/obvious implementation of the) first half of that seems diametrically opposite of “very minimal government”.
Having a government that's there to do no more than take in tax receipts and spend the money on essentials would be minimal compared to what we have at the moment. Right now the government involves itself in practically every aspect of people's lives. It doesn't have to be that way.
But your minimal government wouldn't work. If you have taxes then you need a justice system to enforce collection of taxes. You'll also need a military to prevent outsiders from taking your treasury.
The provision of healthcare, UBI and the like is itself incompatible with "very minimal" government - each of those would involve government control over a non-trivial fraction of GDP. I'm not saying that these things aren't worth doing; some of them may well be. We should be mindful of the costs, however.
For that matter, anarchist thought hasn't historically shown much awareness wrt. the importance of, e.g. social capital provision, as enabled by voluntary "grassroots" institutions like churches and community clubs, as something that's incredibly effective at promoting reasonable, pro-social values and behaviors. (Some of these institutions necessarily involve various sorts of hierarchy and ranking, such that, e.g. a Scout Guide would rank higher than a newcomer Scout. Many anarchists would intuitively dismiss any such hierarchy as inherently coercive - despite the entirely voluntary character of these organizations.)
There has actually been a great deal of thought (and some practice) on provision of services and community grassroots organizations by some strains of anarchism. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
However whether a bottom up, decentralized, participatory democracy still counts as government... I will leave up to the reader.
Anarchy doesn't mean "absence of law". Absence of law is anomie. One is often confused for the other, but there is a slight difference.
Anarchy is more about you and your community having the autonomy to decide your own rules, not a central authority. I believe "autonomy" is the key word here, not "law".
So I am playing a bit of devils advocate here, but then isnt the KKK a good example of Anarchy? The community agreed that part of the residents should not live there anymore, they made there own laws and tried to enforce them.
No, because the KKK itself represents a coercive power structure acting without the consent of those it attempt to enforce power over, which is inherently not anarchist.
If the KKK only tried to harass or harm people who had consented to be subject to them, then you'd have an argument.
This doesnt tally with the previous comment. Then you are saying anarchy has laws, but they cannot be enforced.
So your interpretation is no laws (which can be enforced): then how would you prevent the KKK in forming (violating your rule) without a government to enforce "no minority killings, please"
To call the KKK anarchist is to ignore that they had the tacit approval of the state and contained within their ranks many state actors. It seems odd to me to ask how Anarchism would prevent the rise of the KKK when the state permitted the creation of the KKK.
One view is to see the KKK as basically raiders/marauders who left their own communities to terrorize other communities. Without a state to intervene on their behalf obviously the affected communities would have to rise up in self-defense. So, what really happened? The state didn't intervene on the behalf of black communities. The state would've brutally put down any attempt to resist the KKK with force, black communities were not permitted to use force. The KKK were a state sanctioned paramilitary group carrying out a mission of terror with the aim of preserving the racial hierarchy at the center of the south's the social order.
You might ask "How would this be better with Anarchism?" but I find myself asking "How could it be any worse?"
No, I'm saying anarchy implies laws arranged by consent.
The existence of the KKK is not in violation of anything I suggested. If they want to be an abhorrent debating club, they should be free to.
But the moment they try to initiate aggression, it is justified for anyone to defend themselves, an anarchism would generally consider it justified for anyone to band together to defend themselves, against that aggression, up to and including e.g. creating militias or a standing police force.
The key points throughout are consent and voluntary association, and the ability to withdraw that consent at any time. Not absence of structure, but the minimal structure needed at any time, arranged by consent.
If anything, anarchists are obsessed with structure of society - that is why there are so incredibly many different anarchist ideologies.
I frankly find it bizarre that this is a difficult concept to understand, because conceptually it is very simple: Consider what happens if we delegate power bottom up, instead of appointing representatives who delegate power top to bottom.
In theory nothing needs to change other than that, if we believe that current systems accurately reflects the will of the people.
The reason we're even discussing this is that nobody - not supporters of anarchism or its detractors actually believe that current societies accurately reflects the will of the people.
But detractors assume that people will withhold consent to every structure they believe are needed to maintain a functioning society.
Ultimately it reflects a fear of democracy - a fear that most people will opt to let society collapse, and it's really quite odd to behold these arguments.
This is where I see one of the most striking arguments for anarchist philosophy. That is: It takes, and it took, an immensurable ammount of violence to make the status quo, 'lawful order' is a very shaky concept there. From this perspective it's way clearer that the unbalances and the unlawlessness of a big chunk of the "order" are themselves the sources of so much messed up stuff we have to deal with and try hopelessly to justify(ending up just evading cowardly). So to me anarchism is much more about recognizing dystopia already here and demistifying and dismantling that than some gaseous utopian end state. The way I see it, platonics are kind of irrelevant in this context.
Maybe if there's one, for me, then it'd be that humans already come from nature with capacity for self-determination, conflict resolution, sociability, organization. All those other structures mostly hijacks that and messes it up with imbalances, most obviously by abuse of power, hierarchy being the main instrument for making that. That power itself depended on (some): trust, sociability, harmony & etc to establish itself. I.e.: there are things which should not be decoupled, decouple it, you'll get dystopia. The more I research and get older(32 now) the clearer it is, IMO. Hardest part is getting past all the noise.
A very good introduction to this kind of radical(literally) perspective to me would be Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
P.s.: by the way don't miss that anarchism in this sense is not the same as 'anarchy' as commonly understood. As Chomsky says in a video(youtube "chomsky anarchism"): anarchism would actually ammount to a highly organized society.
> humans already come from nature with capacity for ... conflict resolution ...
Um, I don't think so. Conflict resolution is the main obstacle to the viability of entirely voluntary ("anarchist") organization. That's why it's the self-defining function of any government, even the most minimal.
How often do you find yourself needing third-parties to arbitrate your interactions?
Because for me, outside some formal processes I do for my job, it has been well over a decade since I needed someone to mediate my interactions with someone else.
People are very good at conflict resolution. They only see the cases where it doesn't work out.
People are very good at conflict resolution because third-party arbitration is available as a last resort. They aren't nearly as good at it in e.g. the average Third-World country, where fair and impartial courts are not generally available.
Do you think Somalia is like some never-ending Stallone movie?
Business still gets done. People work, get paid, buy things without knifing each other. It is true that without recourse to state institutions, there is more non-state-sanctioned violence, which is kind of definitional, but also true in absolute terms.
But enormous amounts of daily interaction goes on with humans demonstrating perfectly normal abilities to compromise without killing each other.
This is another form of 'elite panic' - the belief that The Lord of the Flies is just around the corner if Officer Smiley stands down. People don't behave that way in reality.
Since there are a few places on the planet where anarchy sort of reigns like in Somalia, I would like to challenge my anarchic brethren to go try those places for even just 3 months and come back and tell me about their adventures.
First, you assume I'm an anarchist, simply because I'm trying to describe reality instead of pushing an agenda.
Second, you somehow think "scary place hurrr silly anarchist just doesn't want to admit..." is a killer argument. It is just slightly recast version of the "If you like communism so much then move to Russia" schoolyard silliness.
If you want to discuss how political theory intersects the real world, I love that stuff. If you just want to convince yourself anarchists are dumb, that's boring and I'm out.
Again this is taking the position that anarchism would need it's "government program" to justify itself and then maybe society could see about moving over to that program, I don't think that's the point, as I've argued in my previous comment.
The problem with Chomsky as a resource for anarchism is that 1) his anarchism is sui generis, and he doesn't tend to cite or be in conversation with other anarchist thinkers and 2) his anarchism is utopian, and he doesn't begin to outline a program to accomplish it. In practice he's really more of a social democrat whose vision of anarchism basically resembles a self-organizing social democracy with minimized state coercion.
Again this is taking the position that anarchism would need it's "government program" to justify itself and then maybe society could see about moving over to that program, I don't think that's the point, as I've argued in my previous comment.
I agree somewhat, but sadly I think it's stuff of decades maybe hundreds of years for culture & language to go and take more root, here in Brazil there was already a phenomenon of very close information control, semi-monopolies in communication, so, you know, the instrumentation of ignorance & misinformation here found veeeery fertile soil, people lost their shit.. I'm kinda into stoicism too so it's like "yeah you can't force ppl and getting stuff is complex so it's slow", and yes I'm into "persuading", I'd call it "communication" instead though, add to that you'll probably have less 'communication power' than the opposing forces for long periods if not always.. so, it's an spectacular challenge
> Maybe if there's one, for me, then it'd be that humans already come from nature with capacity for self-determination, conflict resolution, sociability, organization. All those other structures mostly hijacks that and messes it up with imbalances, most obviously by abuse of power, hierarchy being the main instrument for making that
What humans come from nature with doesn’t scale to the world and numbers we have built for ourselves (ie past Dunbar number). You can also train a neural net with pen and paper but can’t really build a product that can function in the real world.
All those structures are attempts at trying to test and train a particular architecture of collective intelligence that can scale to real world problems. Obviously all have failure modes and difficulties in innovating and transitioning, but they also have working proof of some degree of functioning. And the hierarchies they form are not caricatures of a tree data-structure, they are much more complicated topologies, because they are more emergent phenomena than conspiratorial captures.
Chomsky’s anarchism seem to define an end state without any prescription on transitioning or path dependencies in between. It also doesn’t have any demonstration on success with negative edge cases. If anything all utopias so far have devolved into dystopias, hence the hesitation.
Even with the most pleasant things in life we are prone to construal level fallacies. Going to Paris sounds awesome right now but my current excitement doesn’t match the moment to moment reality I will face; every minute of the long haul flight, the jetlag, sore feet from walking etc, I don’t even consider these. Our design documents never match our implementations. That is why I am wary of claims like “I can rewrite this system from scratch”.
The main thing is, anarchism is the only philosophy that it's dead-on clear that the structures can and should be questioned and that it can and should be reconfigurable, refactored and etc if we're going with programming terms. It's just democracy but pushed deeper. Anarchism embodies the liberal democracy & socialist ideals, it is coherent with classical thought & philosophy, as well as enlightenment rationality(in case you haven't noticed the current status quo is absolutely losing coherence and moving further from all that), it has also been paired w/ religious ideals.
The idealized citizen in liberal & classical democracy is an anarchist, a free person participating in the matters of the "polis"(city), the "free" distinctions has plenty of consequences if you really get into it, we're talking about people from antiquity here, what they were saying is that only free people could be trusted to participate, this immediately creates a problem of class distinction i.e.: people who owned land, that were free enough to be able to learn philosophy, etc. So, although implementation was imperfect from the start, the kernel is good.(btw I'm an antiquity geek in case you haven't noticed).
What I'm getting at is: there's no rewrite at all, actually, it would be maintenance, paying the tech debt and sticking to the vision. This hollowed out democracy we're with now is a joke.
As Thomas Hobbes beautifully described what in his understanding would be the natural condition of mankind:
"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."[1]
Societies exist as a natural evolution of human connectedness and dependence on each other. Laws as a natural evolution of complex societies attempting to find fair ways to settle disputes. Law enforcement as a natural evolution of societes that come up with laws that not everyone agrees to abide by. The idea that, were we to be left to our own devices would be model citizens is, as you very well put, "demonstrably false fairy tale". The fact that we have laws and law enforcement in the first place is evidence of that.
That being said, ever since I came across the works of Bakunin, Berkman, Goldman, Tolstoy, Camus, etc. as a teenager, I've considered myself very much an anarchist in the traditional and philosophical sense, but definitely not in the cultural sense. That is to say I don't believe that law and law enforcement are incompatible with anarchy: I do share the fundamental believe that all humans are created equal, and that there should be no hierarchies besides those that are natural and organic (e.g. my parents have certain authority over me in the family context, but my parents could equally become my students and I would have some academic authority over them in terms of mentorship, in my field of expertise). Organic hierarchies are the fabric of society and being human. We're not solitary animals, and hierarchies will always form in groups. We can agree that nobody should have any more rights and privileges than others based on claims of nobility, birth, ethnicity, gender, or any sort of social or cultural position, whilst at the same time accepting that in all human gatherings, certain group dynamics will emerge and that's okay as long as we respect each other as individuals and agree to abide by a common set of rules. But I definitely don't believe that humans are good by nature and that society corrupts us -- we are selfish by nature, self preservation has got us here. We're perfect at survival, even if that may mean taking another life, human or otherwise.
I read somewhere that mankind's success is as a result of our capacity for violence. Unfortunately it feels very accurate.
I’m curious what makes you so sure the laws on the books are what’s keeping the majority of billions from randomly shooting each other.
Just because laws exist doesn’t mean they’re what’s keeping your neighbors from randomly gunning you down given they could snap biologically despite the law.
Anarchism doesn’t mean no laws or rules.
Anarchism as a lawless violent mess is the movie version.
One could even keep the Constitution system we have, again anarchism is rules, no rulers. Still need to figure out rules.
An anarchism “hack” at scale IMO starts with a functioning legislative and judicial process beholden to public life not corporatism, and local management of concern rather than having Mr President to eventually function overload, wiggling his pen changing the outputs without legislative action.
It means not believing in grandpas notion of a functional nation state. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the dead should not rule the living. (Indeed they cannot given many facts of science, it’s really lots of vain people emotionally play acting their nostalgia, the world has literally moved on).
Step 1 in the US, restrain the Presidency. It was only ever intended to be a task master for Congress. Step 2 Senate term limits to avoid capture by people who think America achieved the ultimate form of human society in 1980. Step 3 expand representation in Congress, a process which was halted decades ago by special interests. Step 4 expand judiciary to improve access to timely court processes. Yet another process neutered in the last century.
Above all take control of your political future rather than be distracted by what are ultimately disposable technology fads.
I know it’s fashionable to ignore it but you pointed out yourself how much worse it could be without anything, might be a good idea to make sure it’s screwed down.
Sorry, anarchy is fire and brimstone! Mad Max living! Let’s go there!
Does that feel better?
Anarchism isn’t a thing. It can’t have one shape, and color.
Like most things there’s nuance and philosophy to it that the popular memes, and a whole lot of popular writing, do not impart. Vague emotional colorings without functional concept.
Anarchism is fine with collective social norms so long as it’s not at gun point, serving 1% bottom lines.
There’s little to be said about logistical life, we know how to supply people. It’s emotional categorizing of who is lord and who is a serf that we’ve yet to shed.
I think what you meant to say is that sounds like its just tweaks to the existing system
The antonim of reform is revolution.
It does not matter what you reform towars: You could reform democracy to nazism, or communism to market capitalism. In fact such reforms have happened before.
You could peaceeacefull and managed change of existing system is called
How do rules get enforced?
Who enforces them?
Who decides who enforces?
Do rule enforcers therefore have power over other people?
What if people, or large groups of people don't like the rules and refuse to follow them?
Everyone, and as the community grows they'll likely go form volunteer policing to some dedicated people paid via contract, as they used to be historically.
Your assumption that people must behave better in the presence of authority - and therefore worse in the absence of it - is exactly the assumption that is under question.
True, but the real world is about compromises and lesser evils.
Formal authority is quite often better than arbitrary, informal authority. And make no mistake, humans are social, their natural congregations are hierarchical.
I'm not sure this is true. Not only were humans very loosely hierarchical essentially until the invention of agriculture, but anarchism doesn't advocate for arbitrary and informal authority, but for limited in any authority at all unless absolutely necessary, in which case it must be directly kept in check.
Regarding humans being organized very loosely until agriculture personally I wouldn't consider that as a plus.
We're on HN, just think about the pace of human development before agriculture and after. We were pretty much doing the same thing for half a million years and then in 10000 years: rockets in space! ;-)
They are hierarchical. All primates are. Agriculture just revealed the need for a level of social structure no other species on Earth could achieve before.
Regarding your follow-up question, maybe there are ways to achieve the same thing with a radically different social structure. The problem with social changes on this scale is that they are extremely disruptive. I'd rather reform and improve iteratively than rewrite the whole code base ;-)
You should consider the issues of iteratively improving the same code base, pushing to prod for hundreds of years!
Primate dominance hierarchies are weak, accountable, and constantly challenged, and not even necessary in humans which exhibit other behaviors depending on nature. As a consequences, hierarchy is not necessary in humans and not inherent.
That being said, there are ways to move into anarchism that aren't that disruptive as long as the dominant power structure doesn't decide to violently repress it. Syndicalism into market socialism into anarchism is a common one.
But as I said, it's possible to transition to anarchy. You don't need to do it in one bit push. The issue is when the underlying code base is so bad that there is nothing else, but we can certainly try incrementalism.
In theory, there's no reason you couldn't go towards and anarchic society via a million small reforms, but in practice you get executed for using your already existing rights if you state that your goal is to do such reforms.
Is it possible to transition to anarchy in a geopolitical environment of competing nation-states? How would an anarchizing state in the process of gradual self-dismantlement outcompete more centralized states in economic and military terms?
The way most small countries have survived in the past century is to rely on the protection of a larger state with a powerful military and/or on international treaty organizations (UN, NATO, OAS, etc.) which derive their influence from those state militaries.
> And there are ways to have agriculture and industry and compounding scientific advancements without having rigid hierarchies, are there not?
Sure, the absence of rigid heirarchies with strictly top-down authority in favor of fairly fluid ones with something like circular authority where the top of heirarchy is selected and changeable by the people subject to it is a hallmark of liberal society, realized to varying degrees throughout much of the world.
> Not only were humans very loosely hierarchical essentially until the invention of agricultur
Even if they were both this and peaceful then, this would only imply that we merely need to dismantle agriculture and the civilization dependent on it to return to that state, which I submit is an unacceptable trade-off to most people.
And even if it was acceptable to most people, it would take only a small minority opting out to retain the power to subjugate everyone opting-in and ruin the whole effort.
That doesn't follow from the principle. We don't need to dismantle agriculture or anything else, you can also have technological anarchic societies and indeed they exist.
What it means is that hierarchies are not necessary for human organization.
The Zapatista-governed area is at best parasitically technological (it uses imported technology, but neither creates nor maintains much of a technical base).
It certainly might be legitimately viewed as a step up for the most systemically disenfranchised, exploited, impoverished communities, but it's not a demonstration of a way that a technological society can be maintained.
That hierarchical structures became dominant after the invention of agriculture does not imply that agriculture necessitates hierarchical structures.
> And even if it was acceptable to most people, it would take only a small minority opting out to retain the power to subjugate everyone opting-in and ruin the whole effort.
Actually it does, just better training required. I believe the police in Germany is pretty good, but you need at least 3 years (not month) of training.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - who polieces the authority? Mind you an authority includes medieval kings and cobstantly warrrying feudal lords - they were legitimate authority of their time.
I would argue thay society today involve s less tyrany, less authority, and is more peacefull.
That's funny, I see people behave badly even with the authority all the time.
In general though, most people behave mostly good. The ones that behave badly probably would under any social construct. The people I know that got into trouble with the law were the same ones with antisocial tendencies in grade school.
I don't believe that the threat of government enforcement really encourages a significant proportion of edge cases to behave better.
Due to some unique circumstances, I actually have had the opportunity to see what a relatively anarchist society looks like in low-density areas. It honestly works about the same as it does under more supervision. When the occasional real problems develop, people band together and act as their own police force. What there isn't is a bunch of technicality type laws banning you from doing things that don't affect others.
This is all about Dunbar's Number; the number of people you can "know" in the sense of having stable social relations with. Its about 150 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number).
A society smaller than this can be effectively self-policing because everyone keeps track of how everyone else behaves. No money, police, laws or prisons are required because everyone knows what everyone else thinks of their behaviour and wants to stay on the good side of the community that they depend on. So its not a problem.
Once a society grows past Dunbar's number this system breaks down. You see people you don't know misbehaving, but they don't suffer any downside because nobody knows who they are. When you have to deal with people you don't know if you can trust them, but you do know that if they rip you off you won't have any comeback. So the communal trust breaks down and you start needing police, courts, laws and prisons.
In short, anarchism and "primitive socialism" are nice, but they don't scale.
How do you behave when you yourself have authority? Would you stop respecting social norms and expectations if you did, and go on an egomaniacal power trip?
Currently I behave because it's in my interest to abide by laws, even those I don't agree with. If all authority disappeared overnight, I believe my best course of action would be to immediately assemble an armed militia so we could enforce a set of rules within a community that we believe are the best. I would still respect many social norms, but definitely not all of them. One thing that comes to mind is that "innocent until proven guilty" goes out the window. If I perceive someone to be a threat then I will use whatever means I have to neutralize them, rather than waiting for some kind of arbitration.
Right, so you agree that it's better for you to have very limited power and exist without authority, in which case you'd have to confirm to most social norms or suffer consequences, than for authority to exist and for people like you to accede to it?
Because in our system, if you were to accumulate enough authority it wouldn't be in your interest anymore to follow laws.
It's only better for me in an idealistic scenario where my local militia succeeds. If a bigger and stronger one comes around then my life could quickly become horrible.
It matters a lot if the authority is big enough that a random militia cannot topple them. A lone village can be raided with impunity, id the village is a part of a big country then soldiers will move in to protect them.
There is no reason to have such a small authorities. Anarchic societies managed to maintain armies strong enough to deter state actors. It comes with some small sacrifices, but it's still much better than otherwise.
In practice, your village can come to an agreement with other small villages and do military exercises together while still maintaining autonomy, and you can then maintain complex weapon systems and large armies.
I think it's very naive to think a local militia system of government would work like the game Top Trumps.
You'd still have a bunch of people thinking you are a jerk - the reason your life might quickly become horrible is because you've been a jerk to pretty much everyone by claiming that you need to rule them by force.
And this is why anarchy can’t and dosen’t work. 10 minutes later it will be replaced by a new feudalism led by people trying to make themselves king to protect their own best interests.
I'm shocked at how nicely this is wired into our brains. The slightest sight of a cop car in my surroundings cuts all desire to drive even near the speed limits.
I'd argue this shows that you are responding to the punishment, and have complete disregard for the authority (since you don't care to obey the rule when punishment is unlikely).
> "> Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order"
On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things, where-as anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
If a given CEO damages profits for the sake of environment, he can be removed as he is not fullfilling his legal duty, maximising profits. So even if a hypothetical environmentalist became the chielf of ExxonMobil, he wouldn't be able to do much.
> anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
This is not true at all. Protecting the environment isn’t just about actions like planting trees and buying up the occasional extra property parcel to dedicate as a land reserve. It requires government scale regulation to impose negative consequences on people and companies producing negative externalities.
You can argue that the government hasn’t done enough in this regard, but it’s demonstrably not true to claim that 3rd parties have done more than the government to regulate industry and build national park level land reserves.
This is the problem with most pro-anarchistic stances: They take too much of the current system’s benefits for granted while also assuming that less regulation would somehow produce a more regulated outcome.
I don’t understand the desire to put impossible theories of anarchy on a pedestal instead of simply making incremental improvements to the current systems.
Take the example of pollution. Say you're an employee of a fossil fuel cooperative. Is it in your interest to continue polluting? Yes, because you after all own some of the ressources of that company and control it. So what is the anarchist solution? Well, it's in the interests of everyone to stop pollution, right? So you'd need people to come together, decide that population is a concern, at least a good percentage of people, and offer you to be compensated for your investment in fossil fuels in exchange to stop polluting and find another job or not work in industry at all anymore. You might say that this is unrealistic, but for the government to do anything about pollution we needed hundreds of millions of people to protest and a majority of the people agreeing that pollution is a problem worth fixing. And if that doesn't work either, you elect and randomly chose people to supervise the elected with short term limits in order to have authority against pollution.
This is the anarchist solution to the tragedy of the commons in this case.
As for making incremental change, there are hard limits. There are existing power structures that will hamper you very strongly - the state, private interests, the corporate media, and so on. If you do incremental change that they don't like, they absolutely will use violence to prevent you.
> you might say that this is unrealistic, but for the government to do anything about pollution we needed hundreds of millions of people to protest
Hundreds of millions? The organizers of the biggest climate strikes (September 2019) estimated 7.6 million globally, and that's being generous. It's vastly cheaper, easier and more popular to enforce companies to reduce their pollution from their own funds than to pay to do it for them.
For that to happen though, you need a large portion of people to agree to do so. In an anarchic society where production is essentially communally owned, the cost to stop polluting is the same in the end.
So, the "anarchist solution" to the tragedy of the commons - the avoidance of centralized power - entails a majority of the population banding together and acting as some sort of agent, with the power to set rules and redistribute wealth? I see.
No the anarchist solution is to remove the need for that pollution at all. Why frack when wind power works? Sure you don't get as much power but when the whole world isn't spending 1/5 of their day driving from home to office to modify spreadsheets, you'll find some power savings.
I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. To use a network analogy...
Central Planning: [1 Figure 1a]
Functioning Capitalism: [1 Figure 1b]
Anarchy: [1 Figure 1c]
The optimal design lies somewhere between the extremes. 1a seems to be an absorbing boundary condition, so we need stabilization mechanisms to keep the system running near optimal dispersion.
In the past, we had stabilization mechanisms like antitrust law, public jury trials for torts (as opposed to closed-door arbitration), and the tax code. All of these stabilizers have been severely degraded in the neoliberal era.
I think that you may be on to something here. It could have limited police powers and perhaps offer up and guarantee, a, I think we'll call it fiat trading systems based on dolloros (we'll call them). Also people can gather in small groups and elect a leader of sorts to travel to the town square and represent them so it won't be so chaotic when making decisions for the group...
Elinor Ostrom come up with the 8 design principles[1] for dealing with the tragedy of the commons for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize. She concludes that top-down regulation doesn't work because of complexity and laissez-faire because private companies will try to maximize their profits. So she studied common pools and found out that if they missed these 8 principles between groups involved it would lead to depletion or conflicts. This I think is an anarchist solution to the problem only she called it polycentric governance.
> offer you to be compensated for your investment in fossil fuels in exchange to stop polluting
Do you even think about the obvious problems with this approach? Stick works. Carrot doesn't work, it just encourages more of the same. It's in the interest of everyone to stop shitting in the streets, right? But if I get paid every time I take a shit in the street, then ...
I am just making a narrow argument that the current system is responsible for the environmental damage lock, stock and barrel.
Do a mental experiment - imagine the only form of corporation we had was a cooperative, limited to 10,000 employees. Would you expect environmental damage to increase?
I feel it takes large, hierarchical organisations, where the decision-maker is very removed from the consequences, to create this level of environmental devastation.
Now imagine we went through the 70-year long history of environmental protection and did a score:
Proactive environmental action by the government /proper authority is evidence that the current system is working, 1 point for current system. If a government only acts after mass protests or public outcry, I take that as a point for the anarchic system. If there is mass outcry, and still no action, take it as two point for the anarchic system.
If we did the score we'd have to face the fact that most of environmental laws are only on the books because of some form of public outcry or protest.
You are free to argue that anarchism would be disastrous for our standards of living or crime rates, but specifically on the point of environment, it would probably do a lot better.
What is the basis for your belief that smaller groups of people will intrinsically care more about the environment than larger groups?
In an anarchic society, what mechanism would be limiting these cooperatives to 10,000 employees? How would this be enforced, and what would the consequences be for exceeding 10,000?
> On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things.
The fact that our laws have tried to protect the environment and 'utterly failed' is clear evidence that behaviour of individuals and corporations are not, by default, making good environmental decisions.
The idea that these actors, who are bad stewards of the environment when laws are compelling them to be good, would suddenly become good stewards of the environment in an anarchic system, is wishful thinking.
Counterpoint: The legal concept of fiduciary responsibility, and actual de facto laws, legally compel the board of directors and executives of for-profit corporations to produce profit for their shareholders.
There are even special laws for officers of publicly traded companies that make this compulsion even more strict add additional criminal charges for failure.
Now, obviously these laws aren't something most corporate officers think about when they get out of bed. But they absolutely do create powerful incentives and drive the culture of large corporations away from any consideration for ethics.
>absolutely do create powerful incentives and drive the culture of large corporations away from any consideration for ethics.
They absolutely do not. Corporate officers, especially at large corporations, are driven by personal profit, career success, etc. Fiduciary responsibility represents exactly what its name implies: the requirement that you act responsibly on behalf of investors/shareholders. If it was a powerful driver of corporate behavior, then we would expect different behaviors from privately run corporations (I believe that's actually most of them). I do not see that being the case.
> The legal concept of fiduciary responsibility, and actual de facto laws, legally compel the board of directors and executives of for-profit corporations to produce profit for their shareholders.
False. There are no laws that compel a company to produce profits for their shareholders. There is an economic _philosophy_ that argues that since the market economy is the bees knees, it follows that a company that has a higher profit is also 'better', but that does not make it a legal concept. [0]
Fiduciary responsibility in this case simply means that the directors should have the best interest of the company in mind. [1] In most cases shareholders want more money, so making more money is a natural result. But if there is a company whose single mission is to put a colony on Mars, then fiduciary responsibility compels the directors to only focus on that, even if such a colony would be less profitable than setting money on fire.
On the contrary again, look at the death of Lorenzo Anderson at the hands of the Seattle anarchist community.
I’m afraid at the end of everything that happens this year, the data is going to tell us that the only change the anarchists achieved was getting trump re-elected.
I see this when dispersed camping, simple things like cleaning up at the campsite before leaving. Most people don’t have a problem with it but there are small groups who don’t care about anything. Those small groups tend to ruin it for everyone.
You don’t see that at managed campgrounds because you will be fined.
State Parks and National Parks usually have zero tolerance for unwieldy behavior. National Forests are where you’ll see gunshot holes in signs and occasionally trash. I’ve seen entire burnt out vehicles in CA National Forests, it’s a little more wild west.
>I see this when dispersed camping, simple things like cleaning up at the campsite before leaving. Most people don’t have a problem with it but there are small groups who don’t care about anything. Those small groups tend to ruin it for everyone.
As I understand it, an anarchist camping group (for lack of a better name) could still collectively agree on and enforce rules - in many ways still a "managed" campground, just with more shared ownership
Yes! But in a way that works via consensus and that doesn't establish unnecessary hierarchies. For example, you could have people coming in voluntarily agree to the penalties and have the primary stakeholders vote on penalties.
It often seems to me that when talking to people about alternative mechanisms for organizing society we end up just rediscovering our current systems from first principles. At times it feels silly but I think it's a great technique for educating.
I try to do this at work when a new engineer tries to argue that the current system is overcomplicated and there is an easier alternative. Just ask questions, point out edge cases and watch them gradually rebuild the current solution.
Doesn't always work, sometimes the current solution actually sucks. But more often than not they come to understand that by the time they're finished ironing it the details, their proposal is not meaningfully different from what we have.
Yes, in fact a managed private campground with fines is compatible with anarchy provided the owner doesn't have an effective monopoly on places to pitch a tent outside of their campground.
Even if they do have a monopoly, a large group with an effective monopoly on paying campers over some timeframe can negotiate an agreement for reduced or no fines.
Anarchy is about power relations. If they're relatively equal, it's anarchy.
If the cleaners decide to 'educate' the non cleaners, would they be seen has (hier)archists now ?
The small group ruining things is akin to the broken window. It requires some kind of regular process / hygiene to maintain the system in a good enough condition.
I think the whole point of the article is not insist that anarchy is a suitable organizing principle for society as a whole, but that pockets of anarchy already exist and perhaps we should consider allowing a bit more anarchy before we smother everything in heavy-handed power structures and legislation.
> It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
You're rankly speculating, and that puts me in control of the board.
I choose Barcelona, 1936.
Now is the part where you read the relevant Wikipedia entry and attempt to find the intersection between the facts there and what I quoted from you above.
And just to keep the conversation focused: the inability to defend a city against an impending attack from fascists and communists is a completely different problem than the people in the city "acting much worse under anarchy."
Tragedy of the commons, and the laziness of a false sense of security railings.
Basically; I agree with you, and I think it is because of the way people act in a society that seems structured.
People seem to think that if there is a crowd of people, then they are part of the crowd. If a crowd sees someone in trouble, then the people are generally found to be more reluctant to step up and offer help, compared to when they are alone (plenty of research seems to show this.)
I suspect this is a sort of commons tragedy, where we assume that a crowd must hold structure with “people who take care of that sort of thing”, or that someone who feels qualified will somehow step up.
From my own experience it also seems like people tend to relegate any issues to whosoever looks like they have any kind of uniform. (Even employees at shops, etc.)
Were it not the case, we can speculate that people who are forced to bear their own actions would be more inclined to act out their own moral and ethical leanings... rather than the implied relation that illegal = bad, and legal/not-illegal= good (or acceptable).
In a sense then, anarchy is when all that is legal encompasses everything that falls under a sort of Kantian categorical principle. While everything illegal is the universally opposite. (Basically where the extrinsic laws of society match the intrinsic moral values of all citizens.)
Consider that people are in charge no matter what. In the current system, you simply decide to trust others using coercion over the ability of negotiating voluntary agreements for acceptable behaviour.
If people can't be trusted, the current system is also flawed, and has far more severe failure points: get a bad leader, and bad behaviours gets enforced with the power of a nation state.
Anarchy is not absence of law, but presence of consent and negotiation at every level.
I believe that the core issue is the size of the group. That small groups up to 100-150 people (where everybody knows each other personally) would be able to self-organize in an anarchist fashion. Going above that the us/them issues will increase, leading to a need for some type of government.
Thomas Paine touches on this in his works. Every group past about 10 has a government even if it's just a patriarch figure. As the group grows, the government gets more complex and usually it's harder to represent everyone.
I think it's inability to work on large numbers of people is due to an even simpler explanation: the law of large numbers. One giant asshole can do a lot of damage, and with 1000 or more people, you can guarantee there are going to be at least a few.
> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
Indeed, we know that (pace Rousseauian claims) man misbehaves not because some "system" has made him do so, but because he chooses to behave in such a manner, often knowing fully well he is choosing misbehavior. I think most of us, if we're honest, even if our moral understanding is variable, admit that we have acted in ways we knew were unjust before we acted.
To take this discussion further, government is a natural institution, i.e., one which follows from human nature and is natural to human societies for the sake of the common good (whether at the level of the family, the community, nation, the world, etc.). Part of what the common good entails is the administration of justice which requires an authority to administer that justice. In your example, if the problem is, say, industrial destruction of the common good that is our environment which we need to live (provided there exist better ways to secure the good produced by legitimate industry or legitimately permissible industry without that destruction), then the problem is a deficient law that fails to guard the common good.
Healthy criticism of authority is important because we know that those in authority are capable of choosing badly either through malice or incompetence. However, just at there is an excessive deferral and submissiveness some show toward authority that subordinates evidence and reason to authority, there is also a hostility to the very idea of authority. The latter is what rests at the bottom of anarchism. Anarchism in practice devolves into the rule of the powerful because no authority acts as a bulwark against power for the sake of the common good.
So on the one hand we have unbridled capitalism wherein the powerful dominate and exploit the weak, and on the other we have socialism which is the tyranny of government. Both converge at essentially the same point. In both cases, the powerful impose their "laws" on the populace for their own benefit. The empirical evidence corroborates as much and there is no sense in placing one's hope in either. The meat grinder of human existence on this earth is not to be abolished and the solution is not revolution. All revolutionaries are opportunists that prey on resentment, whether it is the product of envy or righteous anger, and parlay it into their own power. It also results in orgies of violence, dead bodies, and rivers of blood.
We are much better off engaging in good actions in our daily lives, many which may require pain, suffering, and sacrifice. All social action is the action of individuals for individuals. A society is only as good as its members. To many, that message isn't sexy. It lack the ecstatic grandeur or the messianic and eschatological satisfaction of what revolution seems to promise. They are like the woman at the well. There is a lesson to be learned here.
Consider there is how you want people to act and how you don't want people to act, to say that you are also reasonable implies that society collectively agrees with you, which would mean you are making a rule that everyone follows anyway. IF this isn't the case and you want people to act differently than they currently act then this is a social problem that can only be solved by engineering society to adopt your values. It just can't be done by dictating legally what people should do, some examples..
Prohibition; it works fine in countries that largely adopt religious values forbidding drinking.. but is impossible to be successful in countries who's society has not been engineered to accept it.
Woman's suffrage; laws banning women voting work fine in countries where the society already feel this way, in most western countries there would be outright revolt.
Even slavery can be legally enforced only to the degree society accepts it, from indentured servitude in societies that embraced laissez faire, to chain-gangs in societies that embraced philosophies of penance and damnation.
Rules and laws are only afterthoughts, put in place after society decides collectively how people should function. Because of this laws are largely superfluous to how individuals act.
> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
You seem to be conflating anarchy with chaos (to be fair most people do, the word "anarchy" itself was probably used as an insult before it was even picked up by anti-authoritarian communists).
The weight of laws in our societies is so big that and it's meaning so large that it's probably more understandable if we say that anarchism doesn't want to supress laws [#]. One particularly good example of law system that couldn't be more anarchist is international law, the main point being that it's normative and not coercive. That's not saying it's not respected, indeed you may suffer consequent actions from some countries if you don't: from diplomatic troubles (moral judgments) to degraded economic relationship (exclusions) and ultimately war (use of force). The basic assumption is that every subject of international law recognizes that the other subject are sovereign entities.
International law is for me the proof that such organizational principles do work in practice, and it's a source of inspiration for thinking about anarchistic organization. Quoting wikipedia, all the right keywords are in there:
> [international law] is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally accepted in relations between [subjects]. [..] It establishes normative guidelines [..].
> The sources [..] include [..] custom [..], treaties, and general principles of law recognized by most [..] legal systems.
> [It] operates largely through consent, since there is no universally accepted authority [..].
The conclusion i'm hitting is that at the planetary level, we do live in some kind of anarchist system. For me it's the biggest lesson of anarchism: the main goal is to conquer the level of states, extending down from the international level and up from the inter-individual cooperative level. I could continue with the fact that this level of states is also the realm of private corporations, which then bridges with usual marxist cooperative production systems rethoric.
[#] The more precise statement would be that anarchistic principles refuse "the singleton" judiciary institution (one that assumes monopoly of justice, has jurisdiction over everything). Judges and courts may still exist, for example contracts could specify under which jurisdiction they may be disputed/upheld.
ps: don't criticize saying that international law is dominated by usa/western countries, that's another debate.
pps: I thought about this international-law example while i was reading Bolo'Bolo (by PM, free access). It's a really funny and thought inspiring short book. Its development on productive and economic relationships is really nice.
The major problem with anarchist and libertarian philosophies is being demonstrated in the US right now ... at least 30% of the population is willingly supporting a man with despotic intentions, seemingly to it's bitter conclusion. The secondary problem is there are always sociopaths willing to use that 30% for their own ends.
Yes, libertarianism is quite close to anarchy or minarchy. It looks like such sentiments are very strong in places where goverment has failed their people for dozens of years, in comparison of Europe for example.
With the exception of anarchism being anti-capitalist.
Any ‘anarchist’ that is pro-capitalism is generally not regarded as anarchist by the wider anarchist movement.
Fun fact: befor the modern US meaning, libertarian used to mean anarchist-communist as a way around french authorities banning the word anarchist in the late 1800 if I remember correctly.
Yes, they are both kinds of libertarianism[1], the main difference is that left wing reject private property (not personal property), which is argued that its existence will create power structures thus defeating the purpose of said libertarianism.
1: “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..." - Murray Rothbard
A swedish rapper said in 1998; "Den enda sanna demokraten är anarkist", translates to "the only true democrat is anarchist".
Not meaning the Democratic party in the US but rather a literal interpretation of the two words. Democrat meaning rule of the people and anarchist meaning no leaders.
I was raised to believe in anarchism, and I still do at heart. But if it were ever to work we'd need strict and global regulations on centralized power that would need to be upheld by a coalition which would itself become a centralized power.
Because evolution itself is randomness unchecked. So a political ideology alone can't control when someone will come along wanting to exploit systems to break free and gain more power for themselves or their own people.
Anarchism does not mean no leader. It means no authority. Hence why it is fundamentally different than democracy because democracy implies an authority somehow attributed to the people (directly or indirectly).
I break the word 'democrat' into demo and crat. 'Demo' meaning the people, the demos, the citizenry. 'Crat' as in hold in Greek. So, citizen-hold. Or alternatively, 'mob rule'!
Really, IMO, you want individual rule for each individual. No system, no groups - just individuals. Anyone free to do what they want as long as they don't harm another individual. Do unto others, and all that.
That would be a closer definition of anarchy for me.
> Because evolution itself is randomness unchecked.
Randomness unchecked is chaos. Evolution actually specifically requires a check, in the form of the organism's environment, which is what prunes the ineffective branches.
This is also so for human organizations. Without agreed upon rules to check undesirable traits we end up with Chaos.
> I was raised to believe in anarchism, and I still do at heart. But if it were ever to work we'd need strict and global regulations on centralized power that would need to be upheld by a coalition which would itself become a centralized power.
Murray Bookchin argued for this in what he called Democratic Confederalism, which would create a series of federated communes with the administrative tasks being undertaken collectively by the confederal network whilst policy would be dictated by the communes themselves. The confederal network would have the right to break up centralized power as it develops in one or several of the communes as well as protect human rights and prevent ecological destruction.
I wonder how a similar essay for other ideologies would look like. Do you buy things? You're a capitalist. Do you keep some things the way they are? You're a conservative. Do you clean your room? You're a fascist. But I doubt someone would bother writing such essays, and if someone did, I doubt it would get upvoted to the HN frontpage. What is it about this that appeals to people? An ideology that feels edgy, but doesn't actually offend anyone?
I think it's an particularly interesting thing posted here at the moment because of the protests and the frequent demonisation of anarchism in the media.
But it's also interesting on hacker news because of the popularity of libertarianism amongst some here. It must be obvious how close anarchism and libertarianism are. In fact when I was first made aware of libertarianism many years ago it was regarded as a branch of anarchist thought.
Libertarianism started on the far left - Dejaque criticised Proudhon for being a 'moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian' and went on to publish the first libertarian paper.
Parts of the Socialist League who counted William Morris, Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx as members were libertarian.
Right wing libertarianism first became a thing ca 1950s and was explicitly a project by Rothbard to bring together anti-authoritarian groups on both the left and the right.
The primary distinction tends to be that right libertarians see property rights as one of the things the state must protect, while left libertarians tends to see property rights as fundamentally oppressive.
I have definitely seen those kinds of essays, for all kinds of positions. It's a natural strategy of persuasion -- "See, you already agree with me 90%, so why not take the final step and join me?" The most obnoxious one I remember reading was one that argued "Do you believe in a world that can be understood? Then by this tortured logic, you are already a Christian."
Aside: "Do you clean your room? You're a fascist" is very funny.
People mean different things when they say they're anarchist. This article describes a mix of libertarianism, humanism and egalitarianism that is quite admirable. But many anarchists are willing to use violence against anything or anyone they perceive as powerful or oppressive, and it's pretty easy to frame pretty much anyone you disagree with in those terms. There's a reason that anarchism is associated with violent stereotypes. I personally prefer to identify with values like egalitarianism and humanitarianism without a label like anarchism that is often associated with violence that I disagree with and don't want to be even remotely associated with.
The thesis of the article is that anarchism is not particularly violent or exotic, but a natural extension of very common moral beliefs and practices. One could argue this is interesting in its own right, given popular depictions of anarchism, but the article goes even further, articulating an anarchistic view of human nature. You can reasonably disagree with this view, as others here have, but to criticize these "talking points" as "generic" seems precisely to miss the point.
I have issues with this article and with anarchism, and I agree that some of this is sophomoric (not sure about sophistry though).
However, this article isn't really for you (or me). There are surprisingly many people who think that "anarchists" simply want to see the world burn and are promoting a society where their children are as likely to be murdered while out playing as not. This article is just saying that that's not the case.
It's obviously too hand-wavy to take us beyond that.
> There are surprisingly many people who think that "anarchists" simply want to see the world burn and are promoting a society where their children are as likely to be murdered while out playing as not.
Indeed. Anarchists clearly do not want to see the world burn, they just redefine "world" to be the few blocks that surround their home. And children are clearly safe when one subscribes to the correct private security service. If children are murdered, that’s obviously a violation of the contract with the security service that must be settled through arbitration.
The let me tell you more tactic is intentional. Longer sales copy tends to sell more. That is, the length of the sales copy is positively correlated with the conversion rate.
Funny how any ideology can take our common beliefs and say: "See? You are one of us".
I didn't know who this guy was until he died last week and was celebrated as a great thinker. I am not familiar with his body of work. But if it's along the lines of "all good is on my side and all bad is on the enemy's side" he was not a thinker. He was just an ideologue.
It’s important to point out here that anarchists are not advocating for lack of organization; people are social animals and must work together to live. They are advocating for lack of power structures of domination and subordination.
Imagine there are two kingdoms on some continent. One is managed by some kind of democratic council, and resources are shared equitably; the other is ruled by a tyrant. Which one is more likely to make war on its neighbors? The tyrant, obviously- because the tyrant has something to gain by conquest (more subjects, wealth, and power) and the democratic society does not (assuming that the society stays democratic after the conquest, they now have to contend with the voices of a lot of angry new citizens). The same applies to any organization: an organization is aggressive and violent in direct proportion to how hierarchical it is.
There is a tragic principle of natural selection that plays out, however, if you imagine that continent and imagine a random arrangement of democracies and kingdoms, over time the kingdoms will make war and expand and the democracies will not. After a few hundred years, most of the citizens of the continent will be living under tyrants. And tyranny has to justify itself to its subjects, through religion or ideology; the subjects will be made to feel that obedience is virtue and that the king is a father figure and so forth. But popular freedom movements will constantly be popping up and have to be suppressed.
Anyone who has ever lived in a share house (or next to one) knows that without laws civilization will descend into absolute chaos and endless tit for tat revenge warfare.
Try parenting with anarchist principles.
At some point you run into limits. The point is, what imposes those limits? Physics, gravity, society or yourself?
Ideally the limits you put on yourself should mean you never encounter (negatively or destructively) any of the other systems of limits. But, not all people are capable of always limiting or controlling themselves, and no...that's not the fault of their being "arbitrary restrictions" or "ludicrous laws" and it's not a "reaction against meaningless oppressive authority", it's just people are not perfect and not always good at acting in a way that doesn't put them up against the other sources of limits.
Even if someone has perfect self-control. Who says they have perfect knowledge of the limits, which if they were to cross them would bring about their destruction or detriment, in any given situation?
You should be the source of truth and guide for your life, but I don't think you can expect to know everything and avoid all risks if you only pay attention to what you think is OK and ignore signals from elsewhere. I think you need to balance it with acknowledging that other people and society has some fucking clue about that stuff as well. It's not perfect either, but you shouldn't not factor it into your decisions.
If anarchists were so clever at charting their own courses, how come they end up getting arrested for stupid shit? I suppose they're "not true anarchists".
Anarchism does not suggest no rules, but voluntary association. A flat share is a perfect example in that if ypu don't like the rules you find other people to share with - the rules are not imposed from above, but the result of negotiation and entered into voluntarily.
I'm not an anarchist though I share some of the views, but so much of the criticism of anarchism comes from misrepresenting anarchism as rejecting all organisation and rules.
Different forms of anarchism favor different levels of organisation, but part of the reason why there are so many variations is exactly that they all believe in the existence of systems of organization and enforcement of rules.
I get that you see it that way. I think that might be shifting the goalposts of anarchism in the face of criticism, and I suspect the appeal to "zero rules" can be brought back later in less critical contexts.
But I appreciate the expanded perspective you've given me. So...voluntary association, but still having rules and organizing. OK, sounds alright.
How is that different to the current global system? I mean it like, I was born in country A, then traveled to country B and C, and discovered actually I didn't like the culture and rules in country A, so I came to live in countries B and C. I can go where I like to choose the system of governance that suits me. None of these countries are anarchist....If anarchism speaks more to the relationship between an individual and a system, and less to the system itself, is it really a system of organization that could replace a social/political system, isn't it more just like a "guiding philosophy" for some individuals? Or a way of describing a set of things that some people might do, even if they are not "anarchists".
It might be me, but anarchy seems to be having an identity crisis.
The biggest problem - people can't easily change countries nowadays (and even before borders, I bet traveling that far was cost prohibitive). So you end up in the situation where you have to follow rules of the contract, which you did not explicitly agreed to
If anarchists are anarchists, they shouldn't be cowed by "top down" rules, they should be able to find a way round them, to suit themselves, without destroying themselves. So that it's "not easy" to change countries shouldn't stop an "anarchist" because they're all about negotiation, personal responsibility and choice, and freedom right? Anarchists shouldn't be people crying in the streets how unfair it is that "big brother" is ruining their pathetic little lives. They should be the men and women of action, calculating and executing their next move for their maximum benefit, and possibly for humankind too.
And if it's voluntary, isn't everything voluntary? I voluntarily accept the social contract, or I end up in jail. I voluntarily accept the laws of physics, or I end up maimed or worse. Voluntary speaks to choice, which everyone has. But negotiated...I don't expect most sharehouses (or workplaces, or schools, or whatever) that you enter as a fresher will make their rules negotiable to you. But to another extent, in "advanced" society, the "law" is negotiable through he courts and lawyers, and blackmail, and in "less developed" society, negotiable through bribes and so on. I don't get where anarchism fits in.
It seems like, either it's something that doesn't make sense (no rules) but people believe it zealotly and use it as disguise for violence, or it's something that can work (rules and choice) but not something that works as some standalone organizing principle of a society that is somehow in opposition to the world today. I mean if anarchism is against society, isn't that oxymoron, because if you're anarchist, you can just exercise your choice and negotiate your way to a better situation for yourself? So you don't have to "change the world" just bend it to how you want it locally.
Am I being too sophist? I don't think so but I seem to be missing some point to anarchism. I might just not get what anarchism is, or maybe I don't want to get it. But it seems like it doesn't make sense to me.
It might be me, but anarchy seems to be having an identity crisis.
The anarchist response to the problems you describe is to advocate the destruction of the state as they see it as inherently an aggressive, coercive abuse of power.
Your attempt at describing everything as voluntary misses that when we talk about something being voluntary, we expect it to be free of coercion. The threat of jail is coercive.
This is a typical left-right distinction where the left are concerned with de facto ability to exercise choice where the right are focused on de jure technical possibility of exercising choice.
As such anarchists argue for the dismantling and destruction of coercive power structures that prevents people from having the de facto ability to exercise free choices.
All of this was there from the earliest conceptions of anarchism.
The difference is one of degree. Moving to another country requires means to do so, and immigration procedures imposed on you by others that means inherently you have rules imposed on you wherever you go.
It also involves the state you move from imposing rules on you that you have never been free to consent to, and a central aspect of anarchism is to e.g reject that the state has a justifiable claim to regulate property in the first place, and so that unlike a flat share where you share a space that is actively used by others, the state attempts to monopolise commons with threats of force.
The degree seems to me to scale up. The sharehouse, the state. It's all the same thing. A sharehouse can be plenty coercive too. Parent - child ? Coercive. Personal relationships, they can be coercive too sadly. But "coercion" on the other side is just "the power of bad", it's psychology. Criticism and threats of penalties really do make people behave better. But it's complicated. Read "The Power of Bad".
And don't give me that complaints about immigration and means. An anarchist should be one for personal responsibility, choice, freedom and negotiation, should be able to bend reality to their will rather than complaining in the streets that it change, right? I guess I also wonder, what the hell do you replace the state with? I mean, states didn't just "magically appear" out of nowhere. They're born out of history of blood and death and suffering and overcoming endless civilizational challenges (Read "Why the West Still Rules For Now"), and I think there's a chance they're our current best solutions to the problem of organizing for stability.
If anarchism was a powerful personal philosophy, a couple rules and regulations would be not barrier. All is negotiation and anarchists are apparently adept at such. I don't get it. Sorry.
Why submit to the sharehouse bitch, but rail and wail against the state? I don't get it. It's the same dynamic. I think if you put the state on a pedestal over you, it's like a type of daddy complex where you are giving away your power. It's all just life. There's no getting around that's it's gonna be hard. Anarchists seem like they want to adapt and thrive, but then they're also complaining. I think their ideology has been misused and they're having an identity crisis.
I appreciate your responses and attitude and I'm not trying to be offensive to you. I'm tapping out of this discussion because I think it's a waste of time to discuss in this age, but I do appreciate your style. Best of luck to you both!
I think you got downvoted for the last paragraph, because otherwise, your post has a solid point and I am sure describes worldview of many people.
I yet to decide for myself on the topic. Just a random thought related to your post - while not making a mistake appears to be important from the individual and perhaps humanity side, it is not necessarily important for there life as the whole (I don't know that, just one possibility I am thinking about).
You might agree with most of what I wrote, and disagree with the last paragraph, that's OK, there's plenty of room for diverse opinions, but then I guess my idea is not new to you, except the last paragraph which must be difficult for you to read.
I think anarchism might be one of those ideologies, that has been misused by rabble rousers to get foot soldiers to do street violence for some cause where the strings are pulled by higher ups. Probably this is a perversion of the true ideals of anarchists, so it's hard today to tell what those are.
But to anyone reading it who thinks of themselves as an anarchist, you'll down vote because it's true and instantly disproves your cherished anarchist ideals, so to protect yourself and your worldview from that you need to pretend it's wrong.
I get it and that's OK for you to do that for you. :) I'm not saying this here for you. I'm saying this here for me. It's a big world out there. Plenty of room for different opinions and experiences.
It's not possible to change people's minds on the internet. They change if they're ready themselves, nothing to do with me, or people respond with hostility to new/unfamiliar information, it doesn't matter if it's correct, like me saying anarchists get arrested for stupid shit, but then explained away as "not true anarchists". I'm not writing here to discuss with people or try to contribute to their perspectives. I'm just writing my points for myself. If people agree with me, I think it's low value because the idea was not new enough. If people disagree, downvote or fight with me, I think it's a waste of my time. Either way, it's a waste of time to engage with others online about ideas. But I think it's good for me to write, but not necessarily put it up here. Sometimes I do tho because I think I like to see my point recorded publicly. I guess that's just vanity, and meaningless. Maybe I should stop that. The noise of agreement or fighting is meaningless. What matters is to think for yourself. Who cares what other people think about ideas? They will be hostile if your ideas is outside their ken, and meaninglessly agreeable otherwise. Either way, your idea should have value to you in your knowing of it. It shouldn't be about them.
I realized I wasted so much time in the past "discussing" on online forums. Now I see it for what it is.
Is it just me, or does this text seems to pretend as if anarcho-communists are the only kind of anarchists and anarcho-capitalist don't exist? It doesn't seem to talk a lot about property rights, but some phrases about "the way society is organized right now" and "useless professions" are not what all anarchists believe.
That’s because all the other kinds of anarchism: anarcho-communism, left wing market anarchism, primitivism, syndicalism, individualist anarchism (unrelated to right-wing libertarianism), communalism, etc… they all agree that anarchism is fundamentally anti-capitalist.
Furthermore anarcho-capitalism has no connection to the wider anarchist movement (and is quite recent) and did not grew out of the anarchist tradition.
Many people, for good reason, believe that anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Wikipedia has a short section of some anarchist criticism of anarcho-capitalism [1].
Anarchists such as Brian Morris argue that anarcho-capitalism does not in fact get rid of the state. He says that anarcho-capitalists "simply replaced the state with private security firms, and can hardly be described as anarchists as the term is normally understood".
Similarly, Bob Black argues that an anarcho-capitalist wants to "abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else". He states that they do not denounce what the state does, they just "object to who's doing it".
Anyone who want's an good read which features anarchism, I'd recommend "The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin. It's an incredible story in it's own right, and has a very complete description of how a completely anarchist society might function.
If what this article says is true, then anarchism will fail for the same reason libertarianism fails. They’re both exercises in ideal realities. They’re experiments with frictionless ramps, and ideal pulleys, and objects falling in a vacuum.
Both in physics and in society, the world is more complicated than “government is unnecessary” or “don’t tread on me”.
Consider the difference between a faceless government and something with a face.
Faceless means impartial, once removed, not having skin in the game. Faceless means not having to take aside. Faceless allows more formality.
Face means somebody who knows you personally. Anarchism means a governing body with a face. People close to you. Society 'freely organizing itself' means politics and people gaining power with social influence. Instead of visible hierarchies, it means invisible hierarchies build from personal relationships.
I want more participatory democracy, more deliberative democracy, not anarchism. Modern liberal democracy with laws and principles and visible hierarchies allows individuals to separate themselves from the village, the mob and the social games involved.
Well, how does a technocratic government suit you? Entirely faceless, run by a bunch of 'scientists' that you can't even vote out, but who know what's best for you.
That's where we are heading. And many on this site are building that future.
There are no fixed solutions for organizing society. We don't know what it is to be a human (only strict ideologies are certain what humanity wants and what the goal is). Allowing changes and feedback is the key.
> There are no fixed solutions for organizing society.
Quite. But who says it is for anyone to organise 'society'?
You're missing the point of anarchism, I think. The only person you need to 'organise' and take responsibility for, is yourself. Most people look to government (not themselves) to take responsibility. And that is the problem.
I still have no idea what Anarchists want. In an ideal anarchist society are there laws? Who enforces? Do you pay taxes? Can you own property or you just build a house wherever you want and defend it? Is there money and who organizes it? Something like a big hydro dam, factories, ships - who owns/builds these and why? Even googling now gives no straight answer.
There is no "straight answer" as there are a variety of viewpoints that could he considered "anarchism" and their responses to these questions differ. This is true of whatever viewpoint you follow too, your personal beliefs differ from the accepted dogma at certain points.
In as small of a description as possible, anarchism generally favors a democratic city state.
What is really being discussed when the word anarchy is produced in contexts like this, is power. Those who see themselves as connected to power will of course vote no. Those who do not see themselves connected to power know enough to shut up about it.
“ Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. “
Lol you lost me immediately. This is essentially pretending anti-vaccers and other groups of people just don’t exist. Just because you’re in a bubble of educated, reasonable people, doesn’t mean everyone is like that, sadly.
838 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadMy question would be: do anarchists really work as professors at the London School of Economics? And Yale? Aren't you a 'system man' at that point?
If there was an anarchistan in recent history it was a probably Somalia and even there you now find a regular government.
He was in support of Corbyn etc - this is to say he was happy to work within the system. You might say that this is a pragmatic view - but really he represented a hard left view.
Anarchism is, by definition, no-leaders. Self-determination. Neither communism nor a libertarian position. So I think in practise he was in contradiction of the beliefs he purported to hold.
BS jobs was good though!
For about a century libertarianism was exclusive a far left ideology including mostly anarchists and libertarian Marxists.
I believe thinking and writing and getting these ideas into the mainstream can be a form of praxis. As Zizek says, sometimes the most revolutionary thing to do is nothing at all.
But should you embrace it? While Yale and LSE are no doubt great institutions, to my mind they are also up there as educators of those who go on to become the system's top managers.
It's not nearly as Conservative as you might think.
The reason is that it helps to present what is in fact a false dichotomy. The radical thought they support is that within the Overton window. Nothing that would really shake up the ruling elite is expressed there. Like CNN and Fox news.
Of course anarchism is a resistance to rule by domination, not to systems and procedures. Some universities are no doubt power centers, though.
edit: anarchism means "no ruler." It's usually painted by people who think rulers are necessary as something like amorphism i.e. "no shape."
I know a banker who is communist. It does not mean that he behaves like a communist in his actions, but he does in his words. From my perspective, he takes the best (or the worst) of both worlds: the quality of life of a very rich man who can afford living in the most expensive places and whatever leisure he wants, and the ability to punch down on the "lesser" people around him from his morally higher stand-point. Never under-estimate people's hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance, especially when what is at stake is exerting power over other people's lives. One can always find a way to rationalize one's crappy behaviour to try to lower the cognitive dissonance after the fact.
That's an incontinent position to hold and he must have high cognitive dissonance of schizophrenia. Except if he is duplicitously self-serving, ie happy to receive the payments but not the opprobrium that comes with a high paying system position.
On one hand one of the things Proudhon and Marx agreed on was that driving down the cost of credit is an inherently radical act - the cheaper credit becomes the weaker the hold of employers over employees becomes, as it becomes easier to start for yourself.
On the other hand in finance you see the mechanisms at work laid bare.
Nowhere else than in finance and in far left groups have I seen the same extent of shared fear (AND optimism - people tend to be unaware the Communist Manifesto starts with fanboy-level praise for the advances brought by capitalism) about the long term societal effects of automation for example.
I guess bankers and communists share the idea of looking at 'the people' as a group to be governed and managed. Both are wedded to the system. I think communistic thinking is the idea that seems to have won, and (technocratic) governance is going to proceed with that as its basis.
Well, I've said that t'so many young people, especially lately, who get this idea that anarchy is some kind of nihilism: "Oh you can't tell me what to do". No! Anarchy, you've got to tell _yourself_ what to do because you've got to learn to become your own best government. And believe me, you can do it better and cheaper than they can.
Utah Phillips, "I will not obey" https://www.youtube.Com/watch?v=h5Ro4rTvDcw
I (used to, pre-covid) see daily plenty people cutting bus lanes, so these exist, and what you going to do to protect society from them? even a stern look is not the anarchist way.
most sport teams have a captain and a trainer and most volunteer forces are under supervision of more experienced staff around here. sure they don't strictly command the squad, but they're the one responsible for organizing participant to minimize internal and external friction
that capitalism is unfair is so generic it's extremely disingenuous to make that critique as a sign of anarchism
there's quite a logical jump from "two wrongs don’t make a right" to "abolish the criminal justice system", which isn't about punishment to begin with in most societies.
"Pretty much every achievement has been based on cooperation and mutual aid" - pretty much most of the contemporary technological jump came from wwii, and the modern technological jump came from private holdings competing and one upping one another.
"Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil" uh, there's psychopathology that need to be cured; how many people submitted to rehab vs how many people were forced into?
"certain sorts of people are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters? " of curse I wouldn't call them "inferior" and "ruling", but some people require continuous assistance or guidance. this question has been loaded with negative term to cause a certain predefined answer to seem the only right answer. ask yourself is someone with dementia would need a tutor to manage their finances instead and help them trough surviving in decent condition, and suddenly the answer is not as much black and white.
hope this is because it's a very short essay to a large introductory text, because otherwise is severely lacking both in arguments and the logic by which what's there has been built.
It’s even worse than that. Most people believe that they act decently. But to paraphrase Feynman, the easiest person to deceive is ourselves. No one (or at least vanishingly few) believe that they are the villain in their own narrative. And yet evil persists in the world.
And they know it, and when you ask them about it, they'll happily say so. They don't believe that they are providing a service, and they're not telling that to themselves either. Why do they do it, then? Because they get money for it. They are well aware that they aren't adding value, but they're doing it because it pays.
I don't believe that e.g. a thief, thugs or fraudster go around thinking they do nothing wrong or that they act decently. They know, they are fully aware that they are a net-negative to society. What I find more interesting in that regard is this: do they realize they are abnormal in that regard, or do they believe that everybody acts like them?
I would say about the SEO affiliate marketers, that they would tell you that they’re no different than other marketers, they just operate in a specialized space.
the most intolerant wins :
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
... but some people like Graeber, make the transition from spreading a mesage form of activism to violent and destructive activism.
Not only does that alienate people, it's also findamentally wrong in a democracy.
If you cannot convince people to vote differently with your words, then using violence and intimidation makes you a cancerous part of the system.
> violent and destructive activism
When? Where? What? This is something I never heard of.
My anarchist sympathies want this to be true but this is a demonstrably false fairy tale. Just look at how we treat the planet and other living things in the presence of lawful order. Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law? It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
The amount he hasn't been able to do in that position is testament to that. Imagine if the US had been an anarchy instead and he'd amassed enough same-thinking folk to take it over?
As long as the concentration of power in the hands of nation states have been the foundation for most of the worst mass murders in human history, it seems quaint to worry that people arguing for making power shared and collective rather than allowing it to be concentrated will do worse.
They will do worse, look around you at wherever there is a power vacuum. What follows? Violence.
So the problem is that the power is not collective other than the power to vote for who the power will be concentrated with. There's a massive disconnect there where, e.g. if we go by US elections, about half the population at any point are ruled by a system they have not consented to.
That is not collective power, at least not collective and shared power of the people, but of a majority at most (even assuming representatives do what their voters want them to, which is also a dicey proposition). Nearly every government in the world tries to limit this tyranny of the majority by legally protected rights to secure the minority against government overreach too, but the fact that they need to demonstrates how flawed this model is.
You assume a power vacuum, but nobody is suggesting a power vacuum, but power mediated by consent, negotiation and bottom up delegation rather than top down coercion.
As long as you're assuming a power vacuum, you're arguing against a strawman.
> If I want to withhold consent to be policed a certain way, I can't, even if I only e.g. live and interact with people who similarly want to withhold consent
What do you think countries are?
Your example of murderers just reinforce that you don't understand the ideology you're arguing against, and opt for arguing against strawmen instead.
You can have people opting out easily without the extremes you suggest. E.g. a murderer can not reasonably "opt out" because they "opted in" the moment they engaged with someone else without their consent.
Again the key is consent, bottom up organisation and voluntary association, not relinquishing all means of protection.
A more reasonable example would be that it is coercive to deny others the freedom to choose what they ingest. Even if it's drugs you don't like. If you want to organise on a small scale a drug free commune, that'd be reasonable. If you try to expand that to a country, it becomes coercive and unjust be nature of forcing massive upheavals of peoples lives, and enforced monopolies over large swathes of land if they don't want to live like that.
Which brings us to this:
> What do you think countries are?
Structures I have no ability to withhold consent from without uprooting my life and/or subjecting myself to another, which unjustly claim monopoly on power over large parts of land. Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
The coercive nature of the relationship means there's a power balance that precludes any reasonable claim of consent.
This highlights the typical left/right view of de facto rights vs. de jure rights. The ability to leave a country confers me de jure rights to extricate myself from the rule of a given state. But de facto I have no ability to find anywhere that provides the freedoms I want, because nowhere exist where they are available. A right wing view is that the existence of the de jure right means I am free. The left wing view is that the de facto barriers to achieving the goal means that I am oppressed, because real world abilities trump theoretical possibilities any day.
It's an excellent example to consider, since vaccines are in that category and some people's free choice to not take vaccines impacts the health of people who cannot take them for reasons of medical complication and now cannot rely on herd immunity to keep them safe.
> Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.
While I like those ideologies for their moral purity, I think they fail in practicality for the reason you've just described: they're unstable. Another group with organized use of force and a willingness to take and hold territory displaces them, and then they get to define their actions as just in their moral framework, regardless of what the libertarians think.
Instead of examples of peaceful anarchism, the history of the world is full of examples showing that those with the will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias, become warlords...
Forming gangs and militias is difficult when the status quo is good for most people resulting the majority being willing to use violence to avoid being ruled by gangs and warlords.
The body of your post there seems effectively to be historically illiterate.
And they aren't just militias, they also run civil society.
The written history, the recent past. We can observe settlements from the past but know very little about the time before farming because there were few or no settlements, which is not actually that long ago. This "will to use violence use it for their own ends, form gangs, and militias" might only be because we ran out of resources and space and shifted from "mother earth provides" to "this is mine". At least, that's what a book I'm reading hints at, but again, it acknowledges very strongly just how little we know.
There isn't a going back to before possessions, obviously, but I'm also not convinced that a majority of us are dishonest by nature. Certainly enough that we need laws and enforcement, but what would happen if we manage to get to a point where there are enough resources for everyone and automatic systems do most of the necessary work like making food? Do we still need the same level of security just to protect ourselves from a few sadists or could we have a more anarchistic society? Can we embrace some of the ideas that those unhappy with our current society propose?
Honestly I feel like most of this discussion is a definition issue. One person will say "anarchism is great" or "that isn't what anarchism is, you have to picture it this other great way" whereas another will make different assumptions and conclude it's ridiculous. It's a bit like being in a communistic country talking about switching to capitalism and arguing that human nature's greed can't be trusted or something. Rather, it might make more sense to propose incremental changes rather than talk about a completely different society where (if we're all being honest) nobody really has any friggin' clue if it'll increase median happiness.
One thing that is clear from history is that forming groups is bad. Making this about us vs them (anarchists vs <insert other group>), left versus right, etc.) inherently causes disagreement when I think most everyone's goal is increasing the common good.
Dividing groups and pitting them against each other is bad. Forming groups was the innovation that set our primate ancestors apart from their solitary mammal peers. None of us are as strong as all of us.
It's like all other revolutions having failed the revolution has now been outsourced to hurricanes and floods. if you want to argue that capitalism or the status quo or whatever is bad, make the case how anarchism functions on an ordinary, boring day, that is to say how it organises regular life, that is the relevant question.
2020 being a great example.
Jesus, this whole discussion is such a shitshow. Every time I hear about anarchism I keep wishing someone would explain to me how it all works, I expected a lot from HN users, but all I keep reading is fairy tails with obvious holes the size of Mount Everest. Like, did anyone even consider to think how you'd resolve the obvious market fallacies (which, despite the name, have nothing to do with capitalist markets, but simply with humans / rational self-interested agents).
The article makes many points against this. It would be better to take those and refute them rather than simply saying "it's painfully obvious".
The details of all this (strategies, how to make it work, etc) is at the core of a lot of anarchist theory.
It's just a lot harder to build peer-to-peer systems than centralized ones, although peer-to-peer systems are ultimately the most resilient.
I guess there is probably also a big difference here between actual anarchists and people who merely sympathise with anarchism (like myself), possibly mainly because they have an anti-authoritarian inclination (which alone, an anarchist does not make).
I don't think that's true, top-down/centralized systems will become exponentially more complex with every new layer.
Demonstrably how?
> Why would you assume that we would act righteously in the absence of law?
What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.
> It is painfully obvious that we would act much worse under anarchy.
Above you said it was "demonstrable" but now seem to be settling for saying it's somehow self-evident.
...
Fwiw I don't personally agree with the quoted statement, or rather I agree with only a narrow interpretation of it.
I don't think individuals are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion in all situations without having to be forced to. I do think groups are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without external force, given certain conditions: anarchism in my mind is about local* law enforcement rather than external.
Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.
*By "local" I just mean internal/within proximity to the individual
Tens of thousands of years of human history. Feuding warlords, and slaves, rather than everyone acting together in unity.
> What is a demonstrably false fairy tale is that we don't act righteously when law enforcement is present. So asking what would happen in its absence seems irrelevant.
Well, we don't have mass rape, looting, or murder. One really needs to compare scale. Democracy seems to be a horrible system, and indeed the worst system, except for all the others (paraphrasing Churchill).
> Self-regulating organisations are possible, the only real condition is the removal of external incentives for those organisations to misbehave.
You're missing scale. SMALL self-regulating organizations do very well. The key condition isn't just about removing external incentives, but also about scale.
Once you're at some scale, you're guaranteed to have a few psychopaths who work to game the system to personal benefit. A key thing about small-scale is everyone can say "Adolf is a jerk. Let's swing clear of him." Large scale, he takes over Germany, and onto the world!
Likewise, large-scale, you're missing social incentives. Small scale, I can say "I won't steal from you, because you'll think I'm a jerk." Large-scale, try leaving your wallet in the train in almost any major city for 10 minutes.
Tribal culture was pretty good on isolated islands. It didn't go Lord of the Flies. That only happened at scale.
I've seen largish organizations sustain this for maybe a half-decade or decade, but never longer. At some point, game-theoretical organizational models take over, and things never go back.
More generally: negative externalities / tragedy of the commons / prisoner's dilemma.
Precisely. Those are examples of how, unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
The whole history of progress in political systems could be oversimplified as a search for laws, structures, checks, and balances to prevent this from happening. In the absence of engineered ones, you revert into anarchy, which leads to individuals amassing power and abusing it.
Things like Democratic Structures, the Magna Carta, and the US Constitution were steps forward to prevent that. Heck, the rigid hierarchy of Ancient Egypt did better than the anarchy which came before. As a primitive form of government, it was incredibly inequitable, but you had far less theft and violence than before. That invention -- explicit governance structures and codified laws -- even in that form, allowed modern civilization.
They will always do this? What is the source of this knowledge? And I ask that in the literal sense, not rhetorically.
You seem to assume anarchy implies no rules, but fundamentally to ensure minimal rules the bare minimum is to shut down any attempt at aggression against others.
An anarchist would argue, however, that protecting society against aggression does not require a top down state.
How do you prevent someone from building too much power? Well, you need to cap their reserves of soldiers/hardware/supplies. In order to do that you inherently need a stronger entity to enforce those caps...
Now ask yourself why you assume they'd be unwilling to build structures capable of resisting attempts to take power, when that is basically the raison d'etre for these groups.
Not unwilling. Unable. Fighting against something rarely works to bring about productive change. Fighting for something is harder, but often does.
refs: French Revolution. Animal Farm. Etc.
And Animal Farm is fiction.
But if you're so sure it is unable, then it doesn't matter then - in that case these systems will never come to fruition, and so debating them is pointless.
The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive. It led to a lot of unpredictable chaos AND it slowed productive change. An ill-executed plan is a setback. You can see what the example of the USSR did to Communism.
I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
While the American revolutionary war provided some inspiration, the path towards revolution in France involved political changes that had been brewing for a century, and its historically illiterate to suggest it was all, or mostly, a result of a "working example".
It also happened on the backdrop of the dissemination of enlightenment ideas from writers like the Genevan Rosseau, the French Voltaire, and English writers like Locke, who equally were an inspiration in America.
1789 also happened to a backdrop of some of the most severe inflation France had seen, after decades of social upheaval, for example. The revolution was a matter of survival for a lot of people, not middle classes upset over minor taxation, and it changed not just France, but Europe and large parts of the world.
Numerous countries, far outside Europe, still have legal codes incorporating large aspects of the Napeolonic Code that codified a large amount of the principles coming from the revolution, for example [1].
> The French Revolution in isolation was entirely regressive.
This is just pure fiction.
It's clear there's no point in debating this.
> I think I started this thread by saying we need to push FOR something positive, rather than AGAINST something. That's prerequisite to positive change. Pushing for something requires a plan. That requires discussion, debate, open-mindedness, and a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. Mostly, it requires a lot of deep conversation and thoughtfulness.
Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code
Well, if it's not worth discussing, I'll leave you to wallow in your ignorance. It's clear your mind is made up.
> Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.
Perhaps, but the converse isn't true, and the converse is what's more relevant to this discussion.
Who kept these statistics?
> unless you place explicit constraints on people's ability to amass power and abuse it, people will amass power and abuse it.
Yes. Anarchism is about putting in place those constraints (via systems design rather than external enforcement since the latter requires amassing power in order to act as enforcer).
> Things like Democratic Structures...
You lost me here. Anarchism is democratic.
You seem to think anarchism is something emergent that existed before rules. It isn't. Anarchism is rules without centralising enforcement, not absence of rules. Feudalism in particular is the direct opposite of anarchism.
Please at least Google the term before you go and further.
I will mention there's a bit of a dance with definitions with some ideologies which I find irksome. This is true here. Yes, there is some definition which can dodge any specific criticism, but those definitions aren't mutually coherent or consistent. You either get problem A or problem B. You can't use one definition to address one and another definition for the other.
This is common of many ideologies. I've found this to be especially true when talking with feminists. They bounce between a push for equality (for example, abolishing employment structures which favor men), and a push for changes which favor women (for example, feminists in divorce law push for policies which favor the mother). When they get caught in a contradiction, the definition changes like a squiggly fish. That lack of rational, critical conversation translates into ineffective tactics, and a failure to achieve change.
Ya' gotta pick one definition. Then we can talk about it.
Since, ironically, you'd like me to find authoritative references before I talk more, here's one I found on Google:
anarchy
1a : absence of government
b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority the city's descent into anarchy
c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
2a : absence or denial of any authority or established order anarchy prevailed in the war zone
b : absence of order : disorder not manicured plots but a wild anarchy of nature— Israel Shenker
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy
The existence/necessity of laws to deter bad behaviour.
That in and of itself should make it clear that anarchism is a fairy tale.
Sure, I'm a good person that wants to do good by society, you probably are too. Nonetheless there are rapists.
And how do you remove those incentives?
You can construct a pretty good argument that, say, absent the structures of "lawful order" around which large corporations grow, fewer people would be driving hours to work each day, drinking water out of plastic bottles, flying across the country on business trips, producing pesticides in Bhopal, piling up ammonium nitrate in Beirut, etc. I think most of us as individuals could lead happy and fulfilling lives and contributing to the advancement of humanity without any of that.
Your assumption is that we led happy and fulfilling lives before what we now call society, which is false. Bad harvest years would routinely decimate communities. Hunger also drove people to steal from others, many times violently (kill, rape, and ransack), and in the best case where they only stole your food, you were now left to starve because a famine affects everyone, and the victims were already on rations as it were.
Local spots of violence in the struggle for the very few resources that we had were very common place. As societies evolved, such conflicts for resources became more necessarily more complex (think bands, think small militias, think city-state armies, think all out war).
The main misconception I tend to see people have is that they somehow believe that our current condition is somehow different from the condition we were in. As if society was imposed on us and we became bad. We are society. Be it a community of ten or a community of a thousand. Good an evil are both sides of the same coin, it's just our nature.
No, that's not my assumption, and I'm confused why you think it is. I'm simply saying that I, right now, in our current state of society, am not driving a car to work or buying water bottles in my current happy and fulfilling life, and the only reason I did that previously (and might do so in the future) is because a corporation backed by our current form of government made it so that I needed to do that to have a happy and fulfilling life.
I didn't say anything about the state of humanity before modern society. You make some good points, but I don't think they have much to do with this particular discussion. You may well be raising a different good objection to anarchism, but it's not the objection I'm responding to.
Law isn't a basis for morality, and there's a lot to be said for how present (capitalist, consumerist) systems promote un-sustainability, despite many on an individual level rejecting those systems.
The interesting (and massive) problem is figuring out why some people act unreasonably in the same situation as someone else who doesn't. If it's something that can be addressed through mechanisms like the provision of healthcare, UBI, equality, or addressing inequality then perhaps society can be structured to have a very minimal government without the need for so many laws simply by making sure everyone is treated fairly and not left in a position where unreasonable actions are a solution to their immediate problems.
The (most likely/obvious implementation of the) first half of that seems diametrically opposite of “very minimal government”.
For that matter, anarchist thought hasn't historically shown much awareness wrt. the importance of, e.g. social capital provision, as enabled by voluntary "grassroots" institutions like churches and community clubs, as something that's incredibly effective at promoting reasonable, pro-social values and behaviors. (Some of these institutions necessarily involve various sorts of hierarchy and ranking, such that, e.g. a Scout Guide would rank higher than a newcomer Scout. Many anarchists would intuitively dismiss any such hierarchy as inherently coercive - despite the entirely voluntary character of these organizations.)
However whether a bottom up, decentralized, participatory democracy still counts as government... I will leave up to the reader.
Anarchy is more about you and your community having the autonomy to decide your own rules, not a central authority. I believe "autonomy" is the key word here, not "law".
If the KKK only tried to harass or harm people who had consented to be subject to them, then you'd have an argument.
One view is to see the KKK as basically raiders/marauders who left their own communities to terrorize other communities. Without a state to intervene on their behalf obviously the affected communities would have to rise up in self-defense. So, what really happened? The state didn't intervene on the behalf of black communities. The state would've brutally put down any attempt to resist the KKK with force, black communities were not permitted to use force. The KKK were a state sanctioned paramilitary group carrying out a mission of terror with the aim of preserving the racial hierarchy at the center of the south's the social order.
You might ask "How would this be better with Anarchism?" but I find myself asking "How could it be any worse?"
The existence of the KKK is not in violation of anything I suggested. If they want to be an abhorrent debating club, they should be free to.
But the moment they try to initiate aggression, it is justified for anyone to defend themselves, an anarchism would generally consider it justified for anyone to band together to defend themselves, against that aggression, up to and including e.g. creating militias or a standing police force.
The key points throughout are consent and voluntary association, and the ability to withdraw that consent at any time. Not absence of structure, but the minimal structure needed at any time, arranged by consent.
If anything, anarchists are obsessed with structure of society - that is why there are so incredibly many different anarchist ideologies.
I frankly find it bizarre that this is a difficult concept to understand, because conceptually it is very simple: Consider what happens if we delegate power bottom up, instead of appointing representatives who delegate power top to bottom.
In theory nothing needs to change other than that, if we believe that current systems accurately reflects the will of the people.
The reason we're even discussing this is that nobody - not supporters of anarchism or its detractors actually believe that current societies accurately reflects the will of the people.
But detractors assume that people will withhold consent to every structure they believe are needed to maintain a functioning society.
Ultimately it reflects a fear of democracy - a fear that most people will opt to let society collapse, and it's really quite odd to behold these arguments.
Maybe if there's one, for me, then it'd be that humans already come from nature with capacity for self-determination, conflict resolution, sociability, organization. All those other structures mostly hijacks that and messes it up with imbalances, most obviously by abuse of power, hierarchy being the main instrument for making that. That power itself depended on (some): trust, sociability, harmony & etc to establish itself. I.e.: there are things which should not be decoupled, decouple it, you'll get dystopia. The more I research and get older(32 now) the clearer it is, IMO. Hardest part is getting past all the noise.
A very good introduction to this kind of radical(literally) perspective to me would be Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
P.s.: by the way don't miss that anarchism in this sense is not the same as 'anarchy' as commonly understood. As Chomsky says in a video(youtube "chomsky anarchism"): anarchism would actually ammount to a highly organized society.
Um, I don't think so. Conflict resolution is the main obstacle to the viability of entirely voluntary ("anarchist") organization. That's why it's the self-defining function of any government, even the most minimal.
Because for me, outside some formal processes I do for my job, it has been well over a decade since I needed someone to mediate my interactions with someone else.
People are very good at conflict resolution. They only see the cases where it doesn't work out.
Business still gets done. People work, get paid, buy things without knifing each other. It is true that without recourse to state institutions, there is more non-state-sanctioned violence, which is kind of definitional, but also true in absolute terms.
But enormous amounts of daily interaction goes on with humans demonstrating perfectly normal abilities to compromise without killing each other.
This is another form of 'elite panic' - the belief that The Lord of the Flies is just around the corner if Officer Smiley stands down. People don't behave that way in reality.
You're not really selling your case very well here...
Second, you somehow think "scary place hurrr silly anarchist just doesn't want to admit..." is a killer argument. It is just slightly recast version of the "If you like communism so much then move to Russia" schoolyard silliness.
If you want to discuss how political theory intersects the real world, I love that stuff. If you just want to convince yourself anarchists are dumb, that's boring and I'm out.
What humans come from nature with doesn’t scale to the world and numbers we have built for ourselves (ie past Dunbar number). You can also train a neural net with pen and paper but can’t really build a product that can function in the real world.
All those structures are attempts at trying to test and train a particular architecture of collective intelligence that can scale to real world problems. Obviously all have failure modes and difficulties in innovating and transitioning, but they also have working proof of some degree of functioning. And the hierarchies they form are not caricatures of a tree data-structure, they are much more complicated topologies, because they are more emergent phenomena than conspiratorial captures.
Chomsky’s anarchism seem to define an end state without any prescription on transitioning or path dependencies in between. It also doesn’t have any demonstration on success with negative edge cases. If anything all utopias so far have devolved into dystopias, hence the hesitation.
Even with the most pleasant things in life we are prone to construal level fallacies. Going to Paris sounds awesome right now but my current excitement doesn’t match the moment to moment reality I will face; every minute of the long haul flight, the jetlag, sore feet from walking etc, I don’t even consider these. Our design documents never match our implementations. That is why I am wary of claims like “I can rewrite this system from scratch”.
The idealized citizen in liberal & classical democracy is an anarchist, a free person participating in the matters of the "polis"(city), the "free" distinctions has plenty of consequences if you really get into it, we're talking about people from antiquity here, what they were saying is that only free people could be trusted to participate, this immediately creates a problem of class distinction i.e.: people who owned land, that were free enough to be able to learn philosophy, etc. So, although implementation was imperfect from the start, the kernel is good.(btw I'm an antiquity geek in case you haven't noticed).
What I'm getting at is: there's no rewrite at all, actually, it would be maintenance, paying the tech debt and sticking to the vision. This hollowed out democracy we're with now is a joke.
"In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."[1]
Societies exist as a natural evolution of human connectedness and dependence on each other. Laws as a natural evolution of complex societies attempting to find fair ways to settle disputes. Law enforcement as a natural evolution of societes that come up with laws that not everyone agrees to abide by. The idea that, were we to be left to our own devices would be model citizens is, as you very well put, "demonstrably false fairy tale". The fact that we have laws and law enforcement in the first place is evidence of that.
That being said, ever since I came across the works of Bakunin, Berkman, Goldman, Tolstoy, Camus, etc. as a teenager, I've considered myself very much an anarchist in the traditional and philosophical sense, but definitely not in the cultural sense. That is to say I don't believe that law and law enforcement are incompatible with anarchy: I do share the fundamental believe that all humans are created equal, and that there should be no hierarchies besides those that are natural and organic (e.g. my parents have certain authority over me in the family context, but my parents could equally become my students and I would have some academic authority over them in terms of mentorship, in my field of expertise). Organic hierarchies are the fabric of society and being human. We're not solitary animals, and hierarchies will always form in groups. We can agree that nobody should have any more rights and privileges than others based on claims of nobility, birth, ethnicity, gender, or any sort of social or cultural position, whilst at the same time accepting that in all human gatherings, certain group dynamics will emerge and that's okay as long as we respect each other as individuals and agree to abide by a common set of rules. But I definitely don't believe that humans are good by nature and that society corrupts us -- we are selfish by nature, self preservation has got us here. We're perfect at survival, even if that may mean taking another life, human or otherwise.
I read somewhere that mankind's success is as a result of our capacity for violence. Unfortunately it feels very accurate.
1. Leviathan, Part 1: "Of Man". c. 13 https://www.bartleby.com/34/5/13.html
Just because laws exist doesn’t mean they’re what’s keeping your neighbors from randomly gunning you down given they could snap biologically despite the law.
Anarchism doesn’t mean no laws or rules.
Anarchism as a lawless violent mess is the movie version.
One could even keep the Constitution system we have, again anarchism is rules, no rulers. Still need to figure out rules.
An anarchism “hack” at scale IMO starts with a functioning legislative and judicial process beholden to public life not corporatism, and local management of concern rather than having Mr President to eventually function overload, wiggling his pen changing the outputs without legislative action.
It means not believing in grandpas notion of a functional nation state. Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the dead should not rule the living. (Indeed they cannot given many facts of science, it’s really lots of vain people emotionally play acting their nostalgia, the world has literally moved on).
Step 1 in the US, restrain the Presidency. It was only ever intended to be a task master for Congress. Step 2 Senate term limits to avoid capture by people who think America achieved the ultimate form of human society in 1980. Step 3 expand representation in Congress, a process which was halted decades ago by special interests. Step 4 expand judiciary to improve access to timely court processes. Yet another process neutered in the last century.
Above all take control of your political future rather than be distracted by what are ultimately disposable technology fads.
I know it’s fashionable to ignore it but you pointed out yourself how much worse it could be without anything, might be a good idea to make sure it’s screwed down.
Sorry, anarchy is fire and brimstone! Mad Max living! Let’s go there!
Does that feel better?
Anarchism isn’t a thing. It can’t have one shape, and color.
Like most things there’s nuance and philosophy to it that the popular memes, and a whole lot of popular writing, do not impart. Vague emotional colorings without functional concept.
Anarchism is fine with collective social norms so long as it’s not at gun point, serving 1% bottom lines.
There’s little to be said about logistical life, we know how to supply people. It’s emotional categorizing of who is lord and who is a serf that we’ve yet to shed.
I don't even understand what this means :-)
Does it mean that I'm rigid (obtuse?). Does it mean that I'm only focused on functional aspects (I also have no idea what this would mean...).
The antonim of reform is revolution.
It does not matter what you reform towars: You could reform democracy to nazism, or communism to market capitalism. In fact such reforms have happened before.
You could peaceeacefull and managed change of existing system is called
Everyone, and as the community grows they'll likely go form volunteer policing to some dedicated people paid via contract, as they used to be historically.
Formal authority is quite often better than arbitrary, informal authority. And make no mistake, humans are social, their natural congregations are hierarchical.
We're on HN, just think about the pace of human development before agriculture and after. We were pretty much doing the same thing for half a million years and then in 10000 years: rockets in space! ;-)
And there are ways to have agriculture and industry and compounding scientific advancements without having rigid hierarchies, are there not?
Regarding your follow-up question, maybe there are ways to achieve the same thing with a radically different social structure. The problem with social changes on this scale is that they are extremely disruptive. I'd rather reform and improve iteratively than rewrite the whole code base ;-)
Primate dominance hierarchies are weak, accountable, and constantly challenged, and not even necessary in humans which exhibit other behaviors depending on nature. As a consequences, hierarchy is not necessary in humans and not inherent.
That being said, there are ways to move into anarchism that aren't that disruptive as long as the dominant power structure doesn't decide to violently repress it. Syndicalism into market socialism into anarchism is a common one.
Regarding the code analogy, I'd rather have a million pushes to prod than one huge force push that rewrites history;-)
In theory, there's no reason you couldn't go towards and anarchic society via a million small reforms, but in practice you get executed for using your already existing rights if you state that your goal is to do such reforms.
Sure, the absence of rigid heirarchies with strictly top-down authority in favor of fairly fluid ones with something like circular authority where the top of heirarchy is selected and changeable by the people subject to it is a hallmark of liberal society, realized to varying degrees throughout much of the world.
But that's not what anarchism is about.
Even if they were both this and peaceful then, this would only imply that we merely need to dismantle agriculture and the civilization dependent on it to return to that state, which I submit is an unacceptable trade-off to most people.
And even if it was acceptable to most people, it would take only a small minority opting out to retain the power to subjugate everyone opting-in and ruin the whole effort.
What it means is that hierarchies are not necessary for human organization.
Where?
It certainly might be legitimately viewed as a step up for the most systemically disenfranchised, exploited, impoverished communities, but it's not a demonstration of a way that a technological society can be maintained.
> And even if it was acceptable to most people, it would take only a small minority opting out to retain the power to subjugate everyone opting-in and ruin the whole effort.
Could you expand on this?
I would argue thay society today involve s less tyrany, less authority, and is more peacefull.
In general though, most people behave mostly good. The ones that behave badly probably would under any social construct. The people I know that got into trouble with the law were the same ones with antisocial tendencies in grade school.
I don't believe that the threat of government enforcement really encourages a significant proportion of edge cases to behave better.
Due to some unique circumstances, I actually have had the opportunity to see what a relatively anarchist society looks like in low-density areas. It honestly works about the same as it does under more supervision. When the occasional real problems develop, people band together and act as their own police force. What there isn't is a bunch of technicality type laws banning you from doing things that don't affect others.
A society smaller than this can be effectively self-policing because everyone keeps track of how everyone else behaves. No money, police, laws or prisons are required because everyone knows what everyone else thinks of their behaviour and wants to stay on the good side of the community that they depend on. So its not a problem.
Once a society grows past Dunbar's number this system breaks down. You see people you don't know misbehaving, but they don't suffer any downside because nobody knows who they are. When you have to deal with people you don't know if you can trust them, but you do know that if they rip you off you won't have any comeback. So the communal trust breaks down and you start needing police, courts, laws and prisons.
In short, anarchism and "primitive socialism" are nice, but they don't scale.
Because in our system, if you were to accumulate enough authority it wouldn't be in your interest anymore to follow laws.
In practice, your village can come to an agreement with other small villages and do military exercises together while still maintaining autonomy, and you can then maintain complex weapon systems and large armies.
I don't believe that, any link? City states are not anarchic nor are tribes.
You'd still have a bunch of people thinking you are a jerk - the reason your life might quickly become horrible is because you've been a jerk to pretty much everyone by claiming that you need to rule them by force.
(Edited to a more general statement.)
On the contrary, it' and indictment of the current law system, it has utterally failed to protect the environment and other living things, where-as anacistic organisations, charities and protest movement have done a lot for the environment. In fact they are the only ones that have done anything at all.
If a given CEO damages profits for the sake of environment, he can be removed as he is not fullfilling his legal duty, maximising profits. So even if a hypothetical environmentalist became the chielf of ExxonMobil, he wouldn't be able to do much.
This is not true at all. Protecting the environment isn’t just about actions like planting trees and buying up the occasional extra property parcel to dedicate as a land reserve. It requires government scale regulation to impose negative consequences on people and companies producing negative externalities.
You can argue that the government hasn’t done enough in this regard, but it’s demonstrably not true to claim that 3rd parties have done more than the government to regulate industry and build national park level land reserves.
This is the problem with most pro-anarchistic stances: They take too much of the current system’s benefits for granted while also assuming that less regulation would somehow produce a more regulated outcome.
I don’t understand the desire to put impossible theories of anarchy on a pedestal instead of simply making incremental improvements to the current systems.
Take the example of pollution. Say you're an employee of a fossil fuel cooperative. Is it in your interest to continue polluting? Yes, because you after all own some of the ressources of that company and control it. So what is the anarchist solution? Well, it's in the interests of everyone to stop pollution, right? So you'd need people to come together, decide that population is a concern, at least a good percentage of people, and offer you to be compensated for your investment in fossil fuels in exchange to stop polluting and find another job or not work in industry at all anymore. You might say that this is unrealistic, but for the government to do anything about pollution we needed hundreds of millions of people to protest and a majority of the people agreeing that pollution is a problem worth fixing. And if that doesn't work either, you elect and randomly chose people to supervise the elected with short term limits in order to have authority against pollution.
This is the anarchist solution to the tragedy of the commons in this case.
As for making incremental change, there are hard limits. There are existing power structures that will hamper you very strongly - the state, private interests, the corporate media, and so on. If you do incremental change that they don't like, they absolutely will use violence to prevent you.
Hundreds of millions? The organizers of the biggest climate strikes (September 2019) estimated 7.6 million globally, and that's being generous. It's vastly cheaper, easier and more popular to enforce companies to reduce their pollution from their own funds than to pay to do it for them.
Central Planning: [1 Figure 1a]
Functioning Capitalism: [1 Figure 1b]
Anarchy: [1 Figure 1c]
The optimal design lies somewhere between the extremes. 1a seems to be an absorbing boundary condition, so we need stabilization mechanisms to keep the system running near optimal dispersion.
In the past, we had stabilization mechanisms like antitrust law, public jury trials for torts (as opposed to closed-door arbitration), and the tax code. All of these stabilizers have been severely degraded in the neoliberal era.
[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/ufiles/i...
[2] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/new-mental-model-comput...
[1]: https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/?...
Do you even think about the obvious problems with this approach? Stick works. Carrot doesn't work, it just encourages more of the same. It's in the interest of everyone to stop shitting in the streets, right? But if I get paid every time I take a shit in the street, then ...
Do a mental experiment - imagine the only form of corporation we had was a cooperative, limited to 10,000 employees. Would you expect environmental damage to increase?
I feel it takes large, hierarchical organisations, where the decision-maker is very removed from the consequences, to create this level of environmental devastation.
Now imagine we went through the 70-year long history of environmental protection and did a score:
Proactive environmental action by the government /proper authority is evidence that the current system is working, 1 point for current system. If a government only acts after mass protests or public outcry, I take that as a point for the anarchic system. If there is mass outcry, and still no action, take it as two point for the anarchic system.
If we did the score we'd have to face the fact that most of environmental laws are only on the books because of some form of public outcry or protest.
You are free to argue that anarchism would be disastrous for our standards of living or crime rates, but specifically on the point of environment, it would probably do a lot better.
What is the basis for your belief that smaller groups of people will intrinsically care more about the environment than larger groups?
In an anarchic society, what mechanism would be limiting these cooperatives to 10,000 employees? How would this be enforced, and what would the consequences be for exceeding 10,000?
The fact that our laws have tried to protect the environment and 'utterly failed' is clear evidence that behaviour of individuals and corporations are not, by default, making good environmental decisions.
The idea that these actors, who are bad stewards of the environment when laws are compelling them to be good, would suddenly become good stewards of the environment in an anarchic system, is wishful thinking.
There are even special laws for officers of publicly traded companies that make this compulsion even more strict add additional criminal charges for failure.
Now, obviously these laws aren't something most corporate officers think about when they get out of bed. But they absolutely do create powerful incentives and drive the culture of large corporations away from any consideration for ethics.
They absolutely do not. Corporate officers, especially at large corporations, are driven by personal profit, career success, etc. Fiduciary responsibility represents exactly what its name implies: the requirement that you act responsibly on behalf of investors/shareholders. If it was a powerful driver of corporate behavior, then we would expect different behaviors from privately run corporations (I believe that's actually most of them). I do not see that being the case.
False. There are no laws that compel a company to produce profits for their shareholders. There is an economic _philosophy_ that argues that since the market economy is the bees knees, it follows that a company that has a higher profit is also 'better', but that does not make it a legal concept. [0]
Fiduciary responsibility in this case simply means that the directors should have the best interest of the company in mind. [1] In most cases shareholders want more money, so making more money is a natural result. But if there is a company whose single mission is to put a colony on Mars, then fiduciary responsibility compels the directors to only focus on that, even if such a colony would be less profitable than setting money on fire.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shareholder-value.asp#t... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty
I’m afraid at the end of everything that happens this year, the data is going to tell us that the only change the anarchists achieved was getting trump re-elected.
You don’t see that at managed campgrounds because you will be fined.
Thus proving the superiority of private property over the complete anarchy of the commons.
As I understand it, an anarchist camping group (for lack of a better name) could still collectively agree on and enforce rules - in many ways still a "managed" campground, just with more shared ownership
In a sort of ceremony where you swear to follow the rules of the - oh I don't know, country? - that you're joining?
I try to do this at work when a new engineer tries to argue that the current system is overcomplicated and there is an easier alternative. Just ask questions, point out edge cases and watch them gradually rebuild the current solution.
Doesn't always work, sometimes the current solution actually sucks. But more often than not they come to understand that by the time they're finished ironing it the details, their proposal is not meaningfully different from what we have.
Even if they do have a monopoly, a large group with an effective monopoly on paying campers over some timeframe can negotiate an agreement for reduced or no fines.
Anarchy is about power relations. If they're relatively equal, it's anarchy.
The small group ruining things is akin to the broken window. It requires some kind of regular process / hygiene to maintain the system in a good enough condition.
You're rankly speculating, and that puts me in control of the board.
I choose Barcelona, 1936.
Now is the part where you read the relevant Wikipedia entry and attempt to find the intersection between the facts there and what I quoted from you above.
And just to keep the conversation focused: the inability to defend a city against an impending attack from fascists and communists is a completely different problem than the people in the city "acting much worse under anarchy."
Basically; I agree with you, and I think it is because of the way people act in a society that seems structured.
People seem to think that if there is a crowd of people, then they are part of the crowd. If a crowd sees someone in trouble, then the people are generally found to be more reluctant to step up and offer help, compared to when they are alone (plenty of research seems to show this.)
I suspect this is a sort of commons tragedy, where we assume that a crowd must hold structure with “people who take care of that sort of thing”, or that someone who feels qualified will somehow step up.
From my own experience it also seems like people tend to relegate any issues to whosoever looks like they have any kind of uniform. (Even employees at shops, etc.)
Were it not the case, we can speculate that people who are forced to bear their own actions would be more inclined to act out their own moral and ethical leanings... rather than the implied relation that illegal = bad, and legal/not-illegal= good (or acceptable).
In a sense then, anarchy is when all that is legal encompasses everything that falls under a sort of Kantian categorical principle. While everything illegal is the universally opposite. (Basically where the extrinsic laws of society match the intrinsic moral values of all citizens.)
If people can't be trusted, the current system is also flawed, and has far more severe failure points: get a bad leader, and bad behaviours gets enforced with the power of a nation state.
Anarchy is not absence of law, but presence of consent and negotiation at every level.
Indeed, we know that (pace Rousseauian claims) man misbehaves not because some "system" has made him do so, but because he chooses to behave in such a manner, often knowing fully well he is choosing misbehavior. I think most of us, if we're honest, even if our moral understanding is variable, admit that we have acted in ways we knew were unjust before we acted.
To take this discussion further, government is a natural institution, i.e., one which follows from human nature and is natural to human societies for the sake of the common good (whether at the level of the family, the community, nation, the world, etc.). Part of what the common good entails is the administration of justice which requires an authority to administer that justice. In your example, if the problem is, say, industrial destruction of the common good that is our environment which we need to live (provided there exist better ways to secure the good produced by legitimate industry or legitimately permissible industry without that destruction), then the problem is a deficient law that fails to guard the common good.
Healthy criticism of authority is important because we know that those in authority are capable of choosing badly either through malice or incompetence. However, just at there is an excessive deferral and submissiveness some show toward authority that subordinates evidence and reason to authority, there is also a hostility to the very idea of authority. The latter is what rests at the bottom of anarchism. Anarchism in practice devolves into the rule of the powerful because no authority acts as a bulwark against power for the sake of the common good.
So on the one hand we have unbridled capitalism wherein the powerful dominate and exploit the weak, and on the other we have socialism which is the tyranny of government. Both converge at essentially the same point. In both cases, the powerful impose their "laws" on the populace for their own benefit. The empirical evidence corroborates as much and there is no sense in placing one's hope in either. The meat grinder of human existence on this earth is not to be abolished and the solution is not revolution. All revolutionaries are opportunists that prey on resentment, whether it is the product of envy or righteous anger, and parlay it into their own power. It also results in orgies of violence, dead bodies, and rivers of blood.
We are much better off engaging in good actions in our daily lives, many which may require pain, suffering, and sacrifice. All social action is the action of individuals for individuals. A society is only as good as its members. To many, that message isn't sexy. It lack the ecstatic grandeur or the messianic and eschatological satisfaction of what revolution seems to promise. They are like the woman at the well. There is a lesson to be learned here.
Prohibition; it works fine in countries that largely adopt religious values forbidding drinking.. but is impossible to be successful in countries who's society has not been engineered to accept it.
Woman's suffrage; laws banning women voting work fine in countries where the society already feel this way, in most western countries there would be outright revolt.
Even slavery can be legally enforced only to the degree society accepts it, from indentured servitude in societies that embraced laissez faire, to chain-gangs in societies that embraced philosophies of penance and damnation.
Rules and laws are only afterthoughts, put in place after society decides collectively how people should function. Because of this laws are largely superfluous to how individuals act.
You seem to be conflating anarchy with chaos (to be fair most people do, the word "anarchy" itself was probably used as an insult before it was even picked up by anti-authoritarian communists).
The weight of laws in our societies is so big that and it's meaning so large that it's probably more understandable if we say that anarchism doesn't want to supress laws [#]. One particularly good example of law system that couldn't be more anarchist is international law, the main point being that it's normative and not coercive. That's not saying it's not respected, indeed you may suffer consequent actions from some countries if you don't: from diplomatic troubles (moral judgments) to degraded economic relationship (exclusions) and ultimately war (use of force). The basic assumption is that every subject of international law recognizes that the other subject are sovereign entities.
International law is for me the proof that such organizational principles do work in practice, and it's a source of inspiration for thinking about anarchistic organization. Quoting wikipedia, all the right keywords are in there:
> [international law] is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally accepted in relations between [subjects]. [..] It establishes normative guidelines [..].
> The sources [..] include [..] custom [..], treaties, and general principles of law recognized by most [..] legal systems.
> [It] operates largely through consent, since there is no universally accepted authority [..].
The conclusion i'm hitting is that at the planetary level, we do live in some kind of anarchist system. For me it's the biggest lesson of anarchism: the main goal is to conquer the level of states, extending down from the international level and up from the inter-individual cooperative level. I could continue with the fact that this level of states is also the realm of private corporations, which then bridges with usual marxist cooperative production systems rethoric.
[#] The more precise statement would be that anarchistic principles refuse "the singleton" judiciary institution (one that assumes monopoly of justice, has jurisdiction over everything). Judges and courts may still exist, for example contracts could specify under which jurisdiction they may be disputed/upheld.
ps: don't criticize saying that international law is dominated by usa/western countries, that's another debate.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/p-m-bolo-bolo
“Libertarians seek to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing individualism, freedom of choice and voluntary association.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Any ‘anarchist’ that is pro-capitalism is generally not regarded as anarchist by the wider anarchist movement.
Fun fact: befor the modern US meaning, libertarian used to mean anarchist-communist as a way around french authorities banning the word anarchist in the late 1800 if I remember correctly.
This first use was in the 1850's I believe. Left wing libertarianism predates the right wing use of the term by about a century.
During that time it was very much a term that encompassed anarchists and some other socialists such as libertarian Marxists.
1: “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..." - Murray Rothbard
Not meaning the Democratic party in the US but rather a literal interpretation of the two words. Democrat meaning rule of the people and anarchist meaning no leaders.
I was raised to believe in anarchism, and I still do at heart. But if it were ever to work we'd need strict and global regulations on centralized power that would need to be upheld by a coalition which would itself become a centralized power.
Because evolution itself is randomness unchecked. So a political ideology alone can't control when someone will come along wanting to exploit systems to break free and gain more power for themselves or their own people.
Really, IMO, you want individual rule for each individual. No system, no groups - just individuals. Anyone free to do what they want as long as they don't harm another individual. Do unto others, and all that.
That would be a closer definition of anarchy for me.
Eloquently put
Randomness unchecked is chaos. Evolution actually specifically requires a check, in the form of the organism's environment, which is what prunes the ineffective branches.
This is also so for human organizations. Without agreed upon rules to check undesirable traits we end up with Chaos.
Murray Bookchin argued for this in what he called Democratic Confederalism, which would create a series of federated communes with the administrative tasks being undertaken collectively by the confederal network whilst policy would be dictated by the communes themselves. The confederal network would have the right to break up centralized power as it develops in one or several of the communes as well as protect human rights and prevent ecological destruction.
But it's also interesting on hacker news because of the popularity of libertarianism amongst some here. It must be obvious how close anarchism and libertarianism are. In fact when I was first made aware of libertarianism many years ago it was regarded as a branch of anarchist thought.
Parts of the Socialist League who counted William Morris, Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx as members were libertarian.
Right wing libertarianism first became a thing ca 1950s and was explicitly a project by Rothbard to bring together anti-authoritarian groups on both the left and the right.
The primary distinction tends to be that right libertarians see property rights as one of the things the state must protect, while left libertarians tends to see property rights as fundamentally oppressive.
Aside: "Do you clean your room? You're a fascist" is very funny.
When you boil down his questions, they're not serious questions about anarchy, they're lame excuses for him to keep talking.
- Do you wait for your turn on a crowded bus?
- Are you a member of a sports team or small group without a leader?
- Do you think politicians suck, and people are selfish?
- Do you really believe the things you were told as a child?
Good grief. These talking points are so generic, any political ideology could use these.
"Are you a communist? The answer may surprise you! Do you like eating toast for breakfast? Many communists also like to eat toast!"
However, this article isn't really for you (or me). There are surprisingly many people who think that "anarchists" simply want to see the world burn and are promoting a society where their children are as likely to be murdered while out playing as not. This article is just saying that that's not the case.
It's obviously too hand-wavy to take us beyond that.
Indeed. Anarchists clearly do not want to see the world burn, they just redefine "world" to be the few blocks that surround their home. And children are clearly safe when one subscribes to the correct private security service. If children are murdered, that’s obviously a violation of the contract with the security service that must be settled through arbitration.
https://novaramedia.com/2020/09/04/the-opposite-of-a-cynic-d...
Here is his series on debt on the BBC. Fascinating stuff if you are or have an interest in economics.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054zdp6
I didn't know who this guy was until he died last week and was celebrated as a great thinker. I am not familiar with his body of work. But if it's along the lines of "all good is on my side and all bad is on the enemy's side" he was not a thinker. He was just an ideologue.
Imagine there are two kingdoms on some continent. One is managed by some kind of democratic council, and resources are shared equitably; the other is ruled by a tyrant. Which one is more likely to make war on its neighbors? The tyrant, obviously- because the tyrant has something to gain by conquest (more subjects, wealth, and power) and the democratic society does not (assuming that the society stays democratic after the conquest, they now have to contend with the voices of a lot of angry new citizens). The same applies to any organization: an organization is aggressive and violent in direct proportion to how hierarchical it is.
There is a tragic principle of natural selection that plays out, however, if you imagine that continent and imagine a random arrangement of democracies and kingdoms, over time the kingdoms will make war and expand and the democracies will not. After a few hundred years, most of the citizens of the continent will be living under tyrants. And tyranny has to justify itself to its subjects, through religion or ideology; the subjects will be made to feel that obedience is virtue and that the king is a father figure and so forth. But popular freedom movements will constantly be popping up and have to be suppressed.
I give you: the modern world.
Try parenting with anarchist principles.
At some point you run into limits. The point is, what imposes those limits? Physics, gravity, society or yourself?
Ideally the limits you put on yourself should mean you never encounter (negatively or destructively) any of the other systems of limits. But, not all people are capable of always limiting or controlling themselves, and no...that's not the fault of their being "arbitrary restrictions" or "ludicrous laws" and it's not a "reaction against meaningless oppressive authority", it's just people are not perfect and not always good at acting in a way that doesn't put them up against the other sources of limits.
Even if someone has perfect self-control. Who says they have perfect knowledge of the limits, which if they were to cross them would bring about their destruction or detriment, in any given situation?
You should be the source of truth and guide for your life, but I don't think you can expect to know everything and avoid all risks if you only pay attention to what you think is OK and ignore signals from elsewhere. I think you need to balance it with acknowledging that other people and society has some fucking clue about that stuff as well. It's not perfect either, but you shouldn't not factor it into your decisions.
If anarchists were so clever at charting their own courses, how come they end up getting arrested for stupid shit? I suppose they're "not true anarchists".
I'm not an anarchist though I share some of the views, but so much of the criticism of anarchism comes from misrepresenting anarchism as rejecting all organisation and rules.
Different forms of anarchism favor different levels of organisation, but part of the reason why there are so many variations is exactly that they all believe in the existence of systems of organization and enforcement of rules.
But I appreciate the expanded perspective you've given me. So...voluntary association, but still having rules and organizing. OK, sounds alright.
How is that different to the current global system? I mean it like, I was born in country A, then traveled to country B and C, and discovered actually I didn't like the culture and rules in country A, so I came to live in countries B and C. I can go where I like to choose the system of governance that suits me. None of these countries are anarchist....If anarchism speaks more to the relationship between an individual and a system, and less to the system itself, is it really a system of organization that could replace a social/political system, isn't it more just like a "guiding philosophy" for some individuals? Or a way of describing a set of things that some people might do, even if they are not "anarchists".
It might be me, but anarchy seems to be having an identity crisis.
And if it's voluntary, isn't everything voluntary? I voluntarily accept the social contract, or I end up in jail. I voluntarily accept the laws of physics, or I end up maimed or worse. Voluntary speaks to choice, which everyone has. But negotiated...I don't expect most sharehouses (or workplaces, or schools, or whatever) that you enter as a fresher will make their rules negotiable to you. But to another extent, in "advanced" society, the "law" is negotiable through he courts and lawyers, and blackmail, and in "less developed" society, negotiable through bribes and so on. I don't get where anarchism fits in.
It seems like, either it's something that doesn't make sense (no rules) but people believe it zealotly and use it as disguise for violence, or it's something that can work (rules and choice) but not something that works as some standalone organizing principle of a society that is somehow in opposition to the world today. I mean if anarchism is against society, isn't that oxymoron, because if you're anarchist, you can just exercise your choice and negotiate your way to a better situation for yourself? So you don't have to "change the world" just bend it to how you want it locally.
Am I being too sophist? I don't think so but I seem to be missing some point to anarchism. I might just not get what anarchism is, or maybe I don't want to get it. But it seems like it doesn't make sense to me.
It might be me, but anarchy seems to be having an identity crisis.
Your attempt at describing everything as voluntary misses that when we talk about something being voluntary, we expect it to be free of coercion. The threat of jail is coercive.
This is a typical left-right distinction where the left are concerned with de facto ability to exercise choice where the right are focused on de jure technical possibility of exercising choice.
As such anarchists argue for the dismantling and destruction of coercive power structures that prevents people from having the de facto ability to exercise free choices.
The difference is one of degree. Moving to another country requires means to do so, and immigration procedures imposed on you by others that means inherently you have rules imposed on you wherever you go.
It also involves the state you move from imposing rules on you that you have never been free to consent to, and a central aspect of anarchism is to e.g reject that the state has a justifiable claim to regulate property in the first place, and so that unlike a flat share where you share a space that is actively used by others, the state attempts to monopolise commons with threats of force.
And don't give me that complaints about immigration and means. An anarchist should be one for personal responsibility, choice, freedom and negotiation, should be able to bend reality to their will rather than complaining in the streets that it change, right? I guess I also wonder, what the hell do you replace the state with? I mean, states didn't just "magically appear" out of nowhere. They're born out of history of blood and death and suffering and overcoming endless civilizational challenges (Read "Why the West Still Rules For Now"), and I think there's a chance they're our current best solutions to the problem of organizing for stability.
If anarchism was a powerful personal philosophy, a couple rules and regulations would be not barrier. All is negotiation and anarchists are apparently adept at such. I don't get it. Sorry.
Why submit to the sharehouse bitch, but rail and wail against the state? I don't get it. It's the same dynamic. I think if you put the state on a pedestal over you, it's like a type of daddy complex where you are giving away your power. It's all just life. There's no getting around that's it's gonna be hard. Anarchists seem like they want to adapt and thrive, but then they're also complaining. I think their ideology has been misused and they're having an identity crisis.
I appreciate your responses and attitude and I'm not trying to be offensive to you. I'm tapping out of this discussion because I think it's a waste of time to discuss in this age, but I do appreciate your style. Best of luck to you both!
I yet to decide for myself on the topic. Just a random thought related to your post - while not making a mistake appears to be important from the individual and perhaps humanity side, it is not necessarily important for there life as the whole (I don't know that, just one possibility I am thinking about).
I think anarchism might be one of those ideologies, that has been misused by rabble rousers to get foot soldiers to do street violence for some cause where the strings are pulled by higher ups. Probably this is a perversion of the true ideals of anarchists, so it's hard today to tell what those are.
But to anyone reading it who thinks of themselves as an anarchist, you'll down vote because it's true and instantly disproves your cherished anarchist ideals, so to protect yourself and your worldview from that you need to pretend it's wrong.
I get it and that's OK for you to do that for you. :) I'm not saying this here for you. I'm saying this here for me. It's a big world out there. Plenty of room for different opinions and experiences.
It's not possible to change people's minds on the internet. They change if they're ready themselves, nothing to do with me, or people respond with hostility to new/unfamiliar information, it doesn't matter if it's correct, like me saying anarchists get arrested for stupid shit, but then explained away as "not true anarchists". I'm not writing here to discuss with people or try to contribute to their perspectives. I'm just writing my points for myself. If people agree with me, I think it's low value because the idea was not new enough. If people disagree, downvote or fight with me, I think it's a waste of my time. Either way, it's a waste of time to engage with others online about ideas. But I think it's good for me to write, but not necessarily put it up here. Sometimes I do tho because I think I like to see my point recorded publicly. I guess that's just vanity, and meaningless. Maybe I should stop that. The noise of agreement or fighting is meaningless. What matters is to think for yourself. Who cares what other people think about ideas? They will be hostile if your ideas is outside their ken, and meaninglessly agreeable otherwise. Either way, your idea should have value to you in your knowing of it. It shouldn't be about them.
I realized I wasted so much time in the past "discussing" on online forums. Now I see it for what it is.
Furthermore anarcho-capitalism has no connection to the wider anarchist movement (and is quite recent) and did not grew out of the anarchist tradition.
Anarchists such as Brian Morris argue that anarcho-capitalism does not in fact get rid of the state. He says that anarcho-capitalists "simply replaced the state with private security firms, and can hardly be described as anarchists as the term is normally understood".
Similarly, Bob Black argues that an anarcho-capitalist wants to "abolish the state to his own satisfaction by calling it something else". He states that they do not denounce what the state does, they just "object to who's doing it".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#Criticism
Both in physics and in society, the world is more complicated than “government is unnecessary” or “don’t tread on me”.
Consider the difference between a faceless government and something with a face.
Faceless means impartial, once removed, not having skin in the game. Faceless means not having to take aside. Faceless allows more formality.
Face means somebody who knows you personally. Anarchism means a governing body with a face. People close to you. Society 'freely organizing itself' means politics and people gaining power with social influence. Instead of visible hierarchies, it means invisible hierarchies build from personal relationships.
I want more participatory democracy, more deliberative democracy, not anarchism. Modern liberal democracy with laws and principles and visible hierarchies allows individuals to separate themselves from the village, the mob and the social games involved.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy
That's where we are heading. And many on this site are building that future.
There are no fixed solutions for organizing society. We don't know what it is to be a human (only strict ideologies are certain what humanity wants and what the goal is). Allowing changes and feedback is the key.
Quite. But who says it is for anyone to organise 'society'?
You're missing the point of anarchism, I think. The only person you need to 'organise' and take responsibility for, is yourself. Most people look to government (not themselves) to take responsibility. And that is the problem.
In as small of a description as possible, anarchism generally favors a democratic city state.
Lol you lost me immediately. This is essentially pretending anti-vaccers and other groups of people just don’t exist. Just because you’re in a bubble of educated, reasonable people, doesn’t mean everyone is like that, sadly.