Anarchism can never even exist, let alone work, because it defines itself in a fundamentally nonsensical way.
It distinguishes itself on the principle of 'non-coerciveness'. But coercion is written into the fact of physical scarcity: if someone wants that food, then someone else cannot have it. Any organisational notion that does not represent that scarcity as constraint on behaviour is useless. It simply fails to address the problem.
What anarchism then does is to confuse and obscure this, or just wish it away. The motif of 'decentralised organisation' is a contradiction in terms: there cannot be structure without some constraint. If every local grouping is always free to decide the rules, then there are no rules. If everyone is free at every transaction to invent their own money, then there is no money. Plus, everyone making up new rules will not scale. (And no, people will not just naturally, magically, happen to agree.) Organisation is essentially hierarchical in its basic one-to-many informational form: there must be some single pattern followed by multiple elements.
What anarchism could sensibly propose instead is more sophisticated democracy: ie, better forms of feedback from participants to rule generation. We cannot avoid rules/structure, but we could more responsively, iteratively, steer the the construction of them.
It's a bit ironic to say anarchism works because people have been interested in it for centuries if not more and yet it has clearly never worked. And then people always bring up something or other "oh, these people were anarchists for 2 and a half months in Spain in 1926, see it works!"
Another glaring inconsistency with anarchism is that if you are unwilling to use coercion or organized force, then how do you defend yourself against another group who will and wants to take you over? You'll just get obliterated and then be forced into their version of non anarchism. And then the nit picking starts "you can defend yourself" yeah but if you haven't been actively cultivating an organized defense force you're going to lose and maintaining an organized defense force involves all sorts of coercion and hierarchies.
No point even writing this stuff, it's not the kind of thing you'll ever convince anyone of who doesn't want to here it but organized anarchism is just such a preposterous idea that it's hard not to.
There are anarchist experiments that lasted much longer, even in the United States. Modern Times in New York was a town that used "labor notes" instead of dollars (within their own community at least), and they had no jails. They existed for 13 years. Eventually some gossipy rumors spread that this eccentric town (which it was) was just a bunch of "free love" weirdos (they were not). The founding members and strongest personalities either moved or passed away, and the remaining people got tired of defending themselves to others, so they reorganized the town as Brentwood. The public library in Brentwood has a neat collection of writings and artifacts from Modern Times, and I once spent a fun day there looking through their collection.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_Community_of_Modern_...
Home, WA was more explicitly "anarchist." It lasted for about 18 years, and I think from the beginning they had a rough time from neighboring towns as it was founded right about the same time McKinley was assassinated. McKinley's assassin was a self-proclaimed anarchist, so overnight the word "anarchist" became notorious and dangerous in mainstream opinion. There was, again, much outside gossip about the town being a weird "free love" town (which was not such a baseless claim in this case). Internally, it seems people never really agreed on social norms about being nude in public spaces, either.
As to your point of defense, I once heard someone describe that as the major difference between anarchism and Marxism. Marxists generally believe that the State needs to be seized from capitalists, and then we must use the power of the State to oppress the oppressors. That is supposed to be a transitory period, and eventually the State will have squashed all capitalist opposition, at which point the State "withers away." The anarchists see all that and say we should try to jump straight to the good part :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state
Funny, I'd rather have you in solitary confinement for the rest of your life then running around robbing people with weapons but hey, psychopath is in the eyes of the beholder.
Just be aware, you can come seize my capital but you better have more guns then I have.
Many anarchists recognise scarcity and admit it's a difficult thing to deal with fairly. But instead of assume they have the one solution and enforce it on everyone else, they leave it to more local levels to agree on a reasonable way to ration scarce things.
You could also easy make the opposite criticism of capitalism: it doesn't recognise abundance and builds almost everything on (often artificial) scarcity.
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Free banking ("everyone making up their own money") was never the disaster currency monopolist would like you to think it was.
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You say locally made up rules that apply only locally don't scale. Does it really scale to have locally made up rules (because they always are) that are enforced globally?
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But yes, many anarchists do exactly what you propose: they experiment way different ways to collectively make decisions. They don't shun all rules.
> people know how to live their own lives and organize themselves better than any expert could
except, of course, for anyone that disagrees that anarchy can work?
> If we ever win the freedom to run our own lives, we’ll probably come up with entirely new approaches to organization
Didn’t take long to come out and admit that!
The truth AFAICT is that humans are animals and animals love a pecking order. You remove the “rules” and all you’ve done is remove the formalization of rule–providing ample opportunity for arbitrary informal rule systems to become established in an unwritten fashion. I’ve found that the people I know that advocate anarchy actually view it as a means, not an end. The real end is the system they think would work best (usually to their benefit, imagine that), and anarchy is simply the step that removes the old system.
You're using language intelligently here in a way that obscures the deductive leap you're making. That some prominent examples of animals love a pecking order (or at least appear to do -- some of the previous conclusions have been refuted in more thorough studies) does not mean that all animals do.
Second, you're repeating a common argument that "if there will be informal cliques of power arising anyway, we may as well formalise and legitimise their power." That's not a universally accepted line of reasoning. It might be the case that flexible orders of informal power results in better outcomes than strictly defined hierarchies of formal power.
> “if there will be informal cliques of power arising anyway, we may as well formalise and legitimise their power“
I’m not saying we should legitimize any unjust system, I’m saying we should fly the plane while we fix it instead of crashing it into the ground, melting it down and recasting it into new parts.
I think it’s more likely we get to better forms of organization by moving forwards, not backwards.
> That's not a universally accepted line of reasoning.
Sounds like argumentum ad populum mixed in with a little “many people are saying…”
> It might be the case that flexible orders of informal power results in better outcomes than strictly defined hierarchies of formal power.
Sure maybe, but it’s on you to elaborate how that could happen, or provide examples.
> strictly defined hierarchies of formal power
My experience dealing with many different government agencies, from border patrol and customs to the IRS and DMV have shown me that government is anything but rigid and well defined; the insidiousness of bureaucracy lies in its fluidity, due to the fact that you’re at the whim of whatever agent stands before you, with all their human imperfections. They had a bad day? They’re off their game? You just might get the shaft.
Still, I think that’s a better place to start building from than square one.
> I think it’s more likely we get to better forms of organization by moving forwards, not backwards.
Now you're implying that anarchism, based on more egalitarian principles than what we have now, is "moving backwards"? Or did I misunderstand this?
> Sure maybe, but it’s on you to elaborate how that could happen, or provide examples.
I feel like research into system safety and performance -- some of it has disseminated into modern management training -- emphasises a low power gradient and a Westrum generative culture. In other words, what we know indicates we should move at least a little bit away from feudalism and toward anarchism.
Even the traditionally strictly hierarchical armed forces are moving toward decentralised control, "commander's intent", initiative on the ground, etc.
> My experience dealing with many different government agencies...
This is very observant! I think it would be better to recognise this explicitly and start from the assumption that power is flexible and informal, rather than keep trying to pretend it's something else.
> Now you're implying that anarchism, based on more egalitarian principles than what we have now, is "moving backwards"? Or did I misunderstand this?
I think it is not a given that anarchism is more egalitarian, especially if you think, like I do, that it provides easy cover for opportunists to exploit it. Pure egalitarianism means reverting to the lowest possible common denominator. Many people will not accept that.
When I say forwards and backwards, I mean getting closer to understanding and defining the power dynamics intrinsic to populations of humans. I think code of law is an output of that pursuit, much like software code is there output of the process of defining whatever system it is modeling.
I have to admit that you’ve brought me to the limit of my knowledge with Westrum, haven’t heard of that before. I’ll have to read some things and chew on that a bit.
Low power gradient sounds nice, but I’ll say two things about it OTTOMH: 1) that is not anarchy, and 2) even a very shallow gradient in a world of 7 billion still results in a very wide base of people at the lowest rungs and a very high rung for the upper crust. Ie it can still lead to large inequalities given a sufficiently large society.
I’m not saying that is fair or right, I’m just saying I’m not seeing convincing alternatives.
> it provides easy cover for opportunists to exploit it
I’ve always thought the opposite is true. A set of rules is bound to be gamed. More rules create more opportunities to exploit (regulation only benefits leechers). When rules are global, profit of exploitation is greater. Therefore, there are more exploiters and exploits. In anarchy, the extent to which a set of rules apply is limited. Therefore, there is less profit from exploitation, and in turn, there are less exploiters.
It means many things, but perhaps one way to put it is that ideas live on their own merit, rather than the rank of the person who proposed them.
You also notice it other ways: information (especially bad news) gets distorted as it tries to travel up a steep power gradient. In a steep power gradient, blame gets assigned downward and credit is claimed upward. Under a low power gradient, people share talk time in meetings more equally.
> a common argument that "if there will be informal cliques of power arising anyway, we may as well formalise and legitimise their power."
There is no "we" here.
If someone has the power to remove the power structures, people will start organising themselves in power structures pretty damn quickly. And those who are organised enough that can accumulate more physical power will immediately start enforcing those structures on others.
It always comes down to physical power, and although I would love to se a society where every single member follows the principles of non-violence, I can't even imagine a world without it.
> The truth AFAICT is that humans are animals and animals love a pecking order.
And the slaves love to get food and shelter for their work.
> I’ve found that the people I know that advocate anarchy actually view it as a means, not an end. The real end is the system they think would work best (usually to their benefit, imagine that), and anarchy is simply the step that removes the old system.
There has to be a name for a "No no true scotsman" fallacy. No true strawman? No system is an end to itself, it serves something or someone. Can we find systems that serve more people or better? Or do you just want to throw tour hands in the air and say "well, people are corrupt haha"?
> And the slaves love to get food and shelter for their work.
We’re skirting awfully close to Godwin’s law here aren’t we?
One of the deepest insights I found in Caste by Isabel Wilkerson was that most people, when put in the position, would capitalize on the opportunity to subjugate their fellow humans. I’m not saying I want to do that, I’m just saying that is reality as I have seen it play out.
> Or do you just want to throw tour hands in the air
Quite the opposite, see my reply to your sibling, I think we can do get farther by working in the systems we’ve evolved vs throwing them all away. I’m not sure anarchism is a good approach to avoiding path dependency in the search for an optimal government, which may not even be possible –as you said, no system is an end itself. We’re going to keep discovering new problems to solve, and I think we’d be better equipped with advanced forms of government. That doesn’t mean they can’t be made simpler or be organized better than they are today.
> One of the deepest insights I found in Caste by Isabel Wilkerson was that most people, when put in the position, would capitalize on the opportunity to subjugate their fellow humans. I’m not saying I want to do that, I’m just saying that is reality as I have seen it play out.
Isn't this basically because they feel forced to, since they're subjugated to someone else?
> One of the deepest insights I found in Caste by Isabel Wilkerson was that most people, when put in the position, would capitalize on the opportunity to subjugate their fellow humans.
that’s the crux of it though isn’t it? democrats (lowercase d) don’t trust any individual to wield direct power over another so they limit their own power and transfer it to the state and then distribute control over the state. anarchists don’t trust others to wield power over them so they seek to remove themselves from obligatory power relations altogether.
i’m not convinced there isn’t a non-destructive path from democracy to anarchy. start where we are today, and increasingly make more systems “opt in”. “you want the power to buy/sell things without FDA approval? fine, but you’ll have to settle disputes outside of our court system.” and keep doing that until you’ve granted the diehard anarchist the legal freedom to legitimately opt out of all prior power relations, and start his village in the woods, no police, no taxes, no restrictions on exchange. actually i’m a little fuzzy on what proportion of anarchists would be satisfied by this, or if it would more likely be rejected as being ancap or libertarian.
I think that pecking order is a poor substitute for any unhierarchical way of interacting. The best team efforts I ever had the honor of being part of, be it creative projects, software projects, music bands, project groups always had a flat power distribution. Having a ruler was not necessary there.
I also had good groups with hierarchies, but never because of the hierarchy, but despite it. These projects were never as fulfilling as the freeform ones, where we collectively decided who needed to do what and what needed to be done. Hierarchies can be very bad when taken too seriously, because your superior is usually not the best at understanding the problem domain at any given point in time and it is very easy to loose the motivation of your subordinates if they don't feel in control of their domain.
That being said the interesting test for any system of power distribution is always scale. Small groups, communes, villages or cities are something else than countries.
The drawbacks of freeform, "structureless" organization do often emerge as the group becomes large, and not directly oriented towards any short-term goal. They're not going to be visible in small project-like settings.
Commenting to go against the current replies who seem to deny obvious social and biological facts.
It's interesting that those types of comments usually come from the same people who would call animals "non-human animals" to show that humans are "just" another animal. Yet when you remind them Nature doesn't keep things that haven't found an equilibrium, they freak out...
Yes, any human group will naturally or forcefully get hierarchically ordered. "Anarchy" is just a fancy idea that doesn't pass reality's test. Or that won't be real "anarchy".
Anarchism doesn’t reject “rules”. It’s certainly not rulelessness. It advocates freedom of self-organization of communities. So, communities will have their own rules.
I lived in Capitol Hill in Seattle during the formation of CHAZ. Anyone interested in anarchism in America should read up on what happened there because it was effectively a month-long stretch where the Seattle city government just abdicated a few blocks. In that short period of time a local rapper with a bunch of guns started patrolling the streets at night, some kids got shot, some murals got painted, parts of a field got torn up to make a crappy community garden. It was a wild ride. Finally got steamrolled by SPD when another two kids were shot.
> a local rapper with a bunch of guns started patrolling the streets at night, some kids got shot, some murals got painted, parts of a field got torn up to make a crappy community garden.
I'm sorry if I'm falling victim to the media stereotypes about your country, but this doesn't sound all that different from the regular news that the rest of the world gets about it.
Well, that thing about the community garden was kind of novel, but unlikely to make headlines outside of a neighborhood watch newsletter.
Honestly this gave me a good chuckle. There was a recent rerun on the Freakonomics podcast about American hyperindividualism and how it leads to us having an unusually high rate of violent crime, which is definitely something I saw play out. Like if CHAZ had happened in Japan (which would have been pretty weird from the premise) it probably wouldn’t have ended with a bunch of shootings and turf wars
I think the big flaw to anarchism is that in a novel situation, people will default to behavior they know. So in this case, people act like they would act in a zombie apocalypse.
If you had anarchism and called it by some other name, it would turn out differently.
Yeah, everyone imagines that anarchy means apocalypse. And that anarchies mean a Mad Max or Fallout type situation with raiders wearing spikes. Or something from Judge Dredd.
An anarchy is more likely to be like a faraway rural area - neighborhood patrols, more self-subsistence, neighbors cutting your grass, some baking banana bread for everyone, people burning garbage, adulterers getting beat up.
CHAZ leaned into the TV stereotypes, and not the more natural historical ones.
Were there really any anarchy ever in estabilished communities (i.e. ones that were tied to land/infrastructure/location and couldn't just move easily)? I thought that, in every single case, either a hierarchy of power formed internally or they were subjugated to by outside power. I mean, why wouldn't it happen?
The big flaw of anarchism is that it's basically impossible to get it to work inside a capitalist system. Capitalism at its essence is about converting wealth to violence*, and when you can do that it's very easy to override any anarchist organisation by brute force.
Anarchism is notoriously bad at systematic violence because it's basically the one thing it's designed to prevent, so it's very hard to defend against easy access to physical force.
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* In everyday practical capitalism, it rarely goes this far. It's enough to indirectly imply a threat of violence. ("If you don't obey my orders I could give you a bad performance review which might lead to you being fired and you will risk being out of a job long enough to have trouble paying your dues to society for the necessities and then you will either die or be taken by force to jail. So you better do as you're told!")
All you need to know about CHAZ is that the "local rapper with a bunch of guns" who was presented as the Face of Anarchy turned out to be an AirBnB superhost with several upscale properties across Seattle.
(He also turned out to be engaging in sexual abuse and trafficking, but that's another story.)
lack of law != anarchism. anarchism or voluntaryism is about the right of freedom of association. people chose to live in CHAZ, they weren't forced. disrespect of property rights is unfortunate and i don't condone that... but property owners, like the soccer field owner, could have hired private security. that's a perfectly anarchist response.
Yeah a lot of local businesses did hire private security, but then there were a bunch of random plainclothes dudes with guns walking around, which wasn’t great for business. The soccer field is publicly funded so I guess the city government could have hired private security but I’m not sure the police union would’ve been happy about it
Also this sounds like the “no true Scotsman” thing. Some of the people in the zone were self described anarchists, they were setting up co ops and volunteer medical services, and if it had succeeded (meaning, not been overrun by violent crime) I’m sure people would have pointed to it as a model of anarchist principles in action.
What if someone hired even more private security, and just tore the whole thing down? What if they shook everyone down, took everything and bailed? Is this a 'perfectly anarchist response'?
It's a good response, and it proves that "hiring security" is not anarchist at all. Anarchy is about preventing power concentration, quite the opposite of guarding by force.
Ancaps and anarchists have very little to do with each other, actually.
edit: to make it clear, I don’t want to “safeguard” the word anarchism, I don’t really care, I’m not part of that movement. But the anarchists that wrote the original article are part of a movement that take anarchism to mean something, while ancaps make it mean something entirely different.
This reads like wishful thinking at best, with various historic references to hunter-gatherer, pre-modern, tribal societies expected to strengthen the point. Modern western society is much more complex. It is this complex structure that gives the average citizen amenities he doesn’t even know someone needs to take care of. Sure, you can have a primitive anarchic society without all these amenities, but to expect that someone in such a society would be willing to build roads and bridges and maintain nuclear reactors for the “communal good” borders with lunacy.
> to expect that someone in such a society would be willing build roads and bridges and maintain nuclear reactors for the “communal good” borders with lunacy.
speaking to the road part: people were perfectly capable of getting around town before we had the automobile or paved roads. in the suburbs i grew up in we had a fairly sprawling trail system kept packed/clear just by regular organic use. as a kid with a bike, that was the preferred way to get anywhere since it kept me away from cars.
to be frank, as a city-dweller who rarely travels beyond a 5mi radius and prefers to get around by bike, an asphalt-free city sounds kinda awesome. i don’t want to understate the significance of modern infrastructure (electricity, plumbing, literally saves lives). i also think it’s worth noting that anarchy doesn’t mean these things have to be created via volunteer efforts or not at all — you’re at least as likely to see a proliferation of home generators and septic tanks instead. which can fairly be claimed to be a step backward along multiple axes: i don’t disagree the amenities would be worse, but “by how much” is i think often overstated.
Real-world hunter-gatherer societies hardly match the idyllic anarchistic fantasy projected onto them. They tend to be superstitious, and patriarchal. With explicit, arbitrary hierarchies enforced by physical violence, or deprivation.
When people discuss hypothetical anarchistic tribal societies, the first thing I think of is the parallel societies that sometimes exist in immigrant populations in the first world. They often feature hawala systems, cash-only societies, occasionally even alternate currencies. I have firsthand experience with this from my own family.
Tribal society is not just a hunter-gatherer thing; it still exists today, as the maximum viable scale of informal organization among humans. A small village hamlet, or even a single HOA in a big urban neighborhood, are effectively the modern equivalents to the old "tribe".
> but has among the lowest life expectancies because the political culture would sooner let poor people die than give them healthcare and welfare.
We die younger because of lifestyle and other factors (basically we are relatively fat and lazy).
On anarchist policing:
> They focus on protecting people rather than property
Property is essentially to human flourishing (not to mention survival). If someone burns down your business, steals your car, or burglarizes your home that harm is felt directly. Only people swimming in luxury can take lightly the theft and destruction of property.
There's a (not so) subtle difference between property and possession. You are in possession of your home, car, and business because these are things you actively make use of, and need for a decent life. This is fully compatible with anarchist principles.
What many anarchists disagree with is the idea of property. Of owning more than you can use. Of accumulating things through inheritance until you have no chance to use it all on your own, so you rent it out to others.
It's basically the difference between using a seat on the train and defending your right to sit there (possession), and picking up your gun to prevent other people from using the 12 seats neighbouring yours (property).
> You are in possession of your home, car, and business because these are things you actively make use of, and need for a decent life.
I don't actively make use of the fire extinguisher in my kitchen, does that mean I do not possess it and can be taken from me at will? On the other hand, most of a billionaire's money is not lying around in some vault, it is actively being put to work in the form of investments into businesses that allow other people to make their livelihoods and add to the material prosperity of our society. Does he not "possess" that money (in the sense that he is using it?)
I am probably coming off as pedantic, but I am skeptical of the distinction you make.
> What many anarchists disagree with is the idea of property. Of owning more than you can use.
Many socalist/anarchists seemed quite content with the destruction of "possessions", peoples homes and livelihoods, during the 2020 riots. Maybe you were not OK with such destruction (and if so, good!)
> It's basically the difference between using a seat on the train and defending your right to sit there (possession), and picking up your gun to prevent other people from using the 12 seats neighbouring yours (property).
I certainly feel that way, but my feelings of safety do not strike me as a very principled way to distinguish between so-called "possession" and "property".
The point of property as it extends beyond straightforward possession is that even things I cannot use today, I might want to use in the future. Property is simply the acknowledged right to pick the "highest and best use" for some asset, balancing the needs of today wrt. those of the future.
Sure, that's true. Maybe you want an aisle seat on the train now because you might go to the bathroom soon, but then when you have you'll want a window seat, until it's nearing nighttime when you'll want a seat in the quiet section. Why not pick up a gun to ensure all those three seats are empty throughout the train ride?
What an anarchist would think is that the rights of the propertied to choose at some point in the future to use something is less important than the right of someone in need to make use of that very same thing right now when they need it.
> Why not pick up a gun to ensure all those three seats are empty throughout the train ride?
This is such a ridiculous caricature and an example of why argument from analogy is so fraught with problems.
I might argue that the more likely scenario in a socialist society (i.e. anti-private property) is that a man who paid for three seat tickets would be forced at gunpoint to hand those seats over to people who didn't buy any tickets.
“Gun” here is a metaphor for capital, which is the instrument of might and right. In capitalism, individuals rarely need guns, because the system has in place necessary measures for what an individual could achieve by resorting to a gun.
> I might argue that the more likely scenario in a socialist society (i.e. anti-private property) is that a man who paid for three seat tickets would be forced at gunpoint to hand those seats over to people who didn't buy any tickets.
Why would a society that has allowed freedom to purchase three tickets would allow others to violate that freedom? Anarchism is not disorder.
“The many stories, past and present, that demonstrate how anarchy works have been suppressed and distorted because of the revolutionary conclusions we might draw from them.”
It's a good read, thanks for sharing. I think it's an important discussion, despite how feasible "true" anarchy can or would be. In my opinion it's important to recognize that ruling by violence, or threat of violence, isn't just. We can do better.
The fundamental acid test of any political economic system is how it can organize for and conduct. Combat for a very long time now has required close organization and synchronization of elements and units and this continues to require structures of authority in hierarchies that are even strikingly alien and ill at ease with today's democracies. The author cites examples of guerrilla war and tribal conflict but societies that relied on these as means to maintain their sovereignty have perished or have been diminished so that they are utterly at the mercy of nations that do not.
Moreover, decentralized political economies cannot either deliver the goods when it comes to economies of scale that modern capital makes possible. Democracies strain to deliver large capital intensive projects like the Hoover Dam or the construction of aircraft carriers but these are simply currently beyond the pale of even more decentralized political economies.
Of course, technology can change how warfare is conducted and reduce the relative advantages of economies of scale. If one prefers anarchist political economy, one should be interested in anything that levels the playing field between decentralized and centralized coordination strategies. When push comes to shove though, will you be so enthralled by anarchist ideals that you would scorn or deny technology that tends to centralization if it makes humanity wealthier or wiser than alternatives?
Most of the examples cited in this book no longer exist, and some only lasted a few years. The stateless societies and social experiments were mostly conquered by imperialist powers or repressed by states.
So even if it worked, it will work only for a limited time.
No it's absolutely not. Libertarianism is similar to anarcho-capitalism which itself has mostly nothing in common with anarchism. Promoting individual freedom over everything else including when it enables exploitation of others by negating the existence of social classes and other forms of domination because everything can be contracted in a free market has literally nothing to do with anarchism, it's even hard to come up with something that could be farther.
"Libertarian" is what anarchists - of the socialist variety - originally called themselves. And many still continue to do so, sometimes with qualifications that became necessary because the economic right tried to appropriate the term. Please don't assist them in furthering that.
They have elections and a government. It's basically a city-state, albeit an inclusive and moderately democratic one. I think it owes more to the ideas of Murray bookchin than anarchists like Gelderloos.
Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is largely a terminological rebranding of some things that were considered a part of the overall anarchist culture.
Better than under their last functioning state, worse than all their neighbours. Note the only reason they don’t have a state is that the US keeps on propping up the UN Transition Government (Puppet) and bombing al Shahab who would otherwise have won the civil war long ago.
In an anarchic society it would not be possible to write this book about anarchy. You used a computer. Where are computers going to come from? The Great Volunteer Computer Industry? How will materials for computers be mined? Which land will be used for that?
No one who has ever owned a home or had a family— no one, that is, with much to lose— supports anarchy.
The moment you come into life, you immediately begin to die, unless someone saves your life… And that continues for the rest of your life. This simple fact is why anarchy cannot work.
Every paragraph I read makes me think that this is the type of philosophy for dreamers who don't understand the difference `∀x` and `∃x`. (something that is true for all cases vs something that is true for at least one case)
It wasn't just a pithy satirical quote from Starship Troopers:
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history
than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful
thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have
always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.
When you vote, you are exercising political authority,
you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence.
The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.
"...violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived" is a powerful statement and any political philosophy must first contend with it's theory of acceptable/required uses of force before anything else can follow.
Immediately you run into the idea that to seriously contend with an adversary who would wish to dominate you or take your resources, you must have the means to develop technology and you must have a hierarchy to coordinate military actions. This new hierarchy is now a form of power and a threat to the very idea of not having an entity that can dominate someone else. It invokes the idea of a tax and funding and use of force to take that funding from others who theoretically share the same values, for to not fund your military is to become dominated. We are quickly reaching a point where nation states ability to target and execute violence exceed the possibility of guerilla resistance.
This article trying to convince me that anarchy can work needs to start with violence at its foundation, not as a barrier or an after thought, but an axiom.
Additionally As a programmer I am somewhat off put by the central idea.
> each person should be the center of society, and all should be free to build the networks and associations they need to meet their needs in common with others.
I feel like this statement says humanity should be an N^2 structure rather than a log(N) structure, which immediately makes me wonder how all the fish don't get fished out of the ocean and how you prevent your neighbor from polluting the world to death.
When I attempted to satisfy myself with skimming, I feel like most arguments can be summed up as "environmental destruction is not a problem under anarchy, because under anarchy environmental destruction is not a problem" followed by an `∃x` explanation rather than an `∀x` justification.
Which reminds me of when I fell pray to the Ron Paul hype because I believed humanity was good and accepted the "free market will solve the problem" and "people will act in their self interest" arguments, when the reality is that these ideologies purpose is primarily to tear down existing institutions and power structures so that currently powerful entities can concentrate their power less impeded. While there may be a temporary period of libertarian-ness or anarchy, it is quickly supplanted with authortarianism. The ideologies cannot sustain themselves, much like communism requires concentration of power as a step before ownership is distributed, which then perpetuates the concentration rather than enacting the distribution resulting in authoritarianism.
If you want to escape/confront domination and exploitation the single most important description is how you distribute the mechanisms of violence/power and how bad faith actors are dealt with even if they are of equal power or have a level that ensures mutual destruction.
I feel it's pointless debating anarchy, socialism and democracy on US-centric platforms. Not just here.
Americans are (in general) just super individualistic and assume worst about "others" and usually "don't tread on me" instead of actually considering fairness of any given set of rules.
Sorry folks.
Also, the "capitalist rationalists" make my blood boil. Their inability to decompose complex social mechanisms to their explicit and implicit functions and imagine other configurations due to above sentiments (others can't be trusted, don't tread on me) make all discussions feel like arguing with a 5 year old.
I think a main problem is we [westerners/americans] tend to consider capitalism as fundamentally existing at the same level of our democracy. Capitalism is itself an extreme case that people seem to feel compelled to follow because it is a convenient label which allows them ignore the fact that it will naturally erode societal fabric as said level.
I think there is a natural selection that these terms go
through. For example, Capitalism is favored heavily because under such a system, anyone can technically amass great riches, which feeds the desire for more of it by both the people who have amassed riches and those who have “yet” to do so, thus the constant buzz and support for it. Anarchy as a concept is never going to be in a place where anyone of power or means, will publicly support such a thing because Anarchy threatens the very structure that has allowed them their amassed wealth and power.
In many ways anarchy is closer to capitalism than it is to socialism. Only slightly relevant, but I wonder what kind of shifts we would see if we were able to separate the concept of a free market from capitalism. I personally think a free market is one of the best incentive structures we have for a network of independent actors, but we should, as a society, support those who wish to invent mand take risks without the potential outcome being literal starvation and homelessness.
Anarchism does work, but only in certain limited contexts, a fact anarchists don't want to admit. It doesn't scale and it doesn't have a decision mechanism that can handle dissensus. Basically anarchists are like Quakers who are (probably) inot punk rock and would rather forget about the religious origins of their philosophy.
I actually think anarchists bring something valuable to politics, but a lot of them are LARPing as revolutionaries - in the sense of seeing opportunity for a different sort of polity in the failure of the current paradigm, but without any capability to realize that or any functional model to draw upon. Like Marxists, they're mostly stuck in the 19th century.
This is like saying "Batman Returns" has taught me all I need to know about the practices of US law enforcement. (It seems that US law enforcement is largely carried out by independently wealthy martial arts hobbyists with latex fetishes.)
Das Kapital is not a book about Marxism, and it is not fictional, though it is wrong about some things. Marxism is a movement about Das Kapital; consequently you can learn a great deal about Marxism by reading it.
The Dispossessed is a work of fiction; it tells you what was in the mind of its author. But, like Das Kapital, it has built up a certain following, and you can probably learn a lot about that following from reading the book, just as you can learn about cosplayers by reading (or watching) Batman. However, this doesn't tell you much of anything about the possible ways human society can be organized.
AFAIR "The Dispossed" assumed people will accept radically lower standard of living, if the system itself is "fair" (low inequality). Communism implemented that in pratice (low inequality, but also low standard of living) and people hated it.
None of the regimes that used the label "communist" in our actual history have ever implemented anything like that in practice. In USSR under Stalin, families of well-off party members (not just political elites, but valuable specialists as well) had domestic servants - not even in a wink wink nudge nudge kind of way, but all completely legal and official.
Communists, and statist socialists in general, are actually represented in the book as the state of Thu. And it's implied to be just as nasty and authoritarian as the real deal.
Polish communist apparatchiks were better off than regular Poles, but they essentially lived the life of middle class American (a house, car, maybe summer cottage, yearly vacations in Bulgaria or some other place with a sea and a lot of sun). The inequality levels were low back then. Nevertheless, people hated it.
The important thing in this case isn't the absolute degree of income inequality, but rather how it is perceived. When state propaganda talks non-stop about how everybody's equal in this new paradise, yet every day you see things - even little ones - demonstrating that some animals are manifestly more equal than others, that can grate a lot more than a similar relative difference in a society that openly puts inequality on its shield.
And there was no shortage of those little things. Well, I can't speak for Poland, but even in the late USSR (which was comparatively less unequal than Stalin's one, ironically), there was still blat and Beryozkas.
> Currency-based economies have only existed a few thousand years, and capitalism has only been around a few hundred years. The latter has proven to work quite miserably, (...)
You've got to be decadent, spoiled, detached from reality westerner to write such nonsense.
We know from 1929 crisis that pure capitalism as such doesn't work. Yet governments go on and on about free market and competition… Yet whenever something happens they are ready to give handouts to companies (especially big ones) because otherwise everything collapses.
It's basically socialism when things go bad and capitalism when things are good.
> We know from 1929 crisis that pure capitalism as such doesn't work.
That's nonsense repeated by fiaters to justify their money spigot. Federal Reserve was created in 1913, and low and behold took it less than two decades to fail catastrophically by causing credit and asset bubble that collapsed in 1929.
Capitalism works perfectly fine if you let it be. It has some boom and bust cycles caused by human psychology, but non-prudent actors get periodically removed from the system and that's about it.
If you do any research on the subject and read anything that isn't coming from government sponsored sources, it is clear as day.
> Yet governments ...
Yes. Because the governments are the problem, not the capitalism. In capitalism rich greedy financiers would go bankrupt over and over and over, and there would be no government to bail them out.
Your problem is not capitalism. It's the government.
> Capitalism works perfectly fine if you let it be.
Shame that nobody ever in history let it be. I mean, after all, why would they? Have you thought about what the point of getting power is? It's certainly not to then let go of it...
> Right up until climate change destroys your ivory towers.
any state with power can decide how to regulate the commons/natural resources/etc. capitalism exacerbates latent issues through its mandate to continually grow consumption, but a government could feasibly enforce that its citizens’ activities be environmentally neutral regardless of economic system, if it so desired.
> any state with power can decide how to regulate the commons/natural resources/etc.
Not when they're embedded within Capitalism, and relentlessly lobbied by the rich with vested interests in the other direction. See the other half of my previous comment.
> We know from 1929 crisis that pure capitalism as such doesn't work.
There was a large depression 10 years prior, but it ended fairly abruptly and lead to an economic boom not long after precisely because the market was allowed to operate freely.
The depression of 1929 held on and was worsened precisely because of state intervention.
It distinguishes itself on the principle of 'non-coerciveness'. But coercion is written into the fact of physical scarcity: if someone wants that food, then someone else cannot have it. Any organisational notion that does not represent that scarcity as constraint on behaviour is useless. It simply fails to address the problem.
What anarchism then does is to confuse and obscure this, or just wish it away. The motif of 'decentralised organisation' is a contradiction in terms: there cannot be structure without some constraint. If every local grouping is always free to decide the rules, then there are no rules. If everyone is free at every transaction to invent their own money, then there is no money. Plus, everyone making up new rules will not scale. (And no, people will not just naturally, magically, happen to agree.) Organisation is essentially hierarchical in its basic one-to-many informational form: there must be some single pattern followed by multiple elements.
What anarchism could sensibly propose instead is more sophisticated democracy: ie, better forms of feedback from participants to rule generation. We cannot avoid rules/structure, but we could more responsively, iteratively, steer the the construction of them.