Anarchists?

Great Debates
41

and now back to our regularly scheduled debate…
OK, raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a line of thought that runs something like this:

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. In order for us to enjoy this system of representative democracy and to have freedoms that we currently share such as freedom of speech and of the press and of peaceful assembly, it is necessary for enough of us, as individual, to cherish those freedoms and to defend our way of government against those who would place the iron boot of tyranny on our throat and establish a police state, making all decisions for us and giving us no right to choose for ourselves where we will live or work or worship, or what opinions of the current leadership we shall voice.”

All right, do you agree with this overall sentiment? Well then, how much more so indeed it applies to our hypothetical anarchy! Yes, in order to have a viable anarchy, it is necessary for a pretty wide selection of those so organized to value what they’ve got, and to work within it to address any threats to it as they arise.

Meanwhile, however, consider the flip side. Once having been established, representative democracies as we know them have turned out to be pretty robust, despite the assumed presence of a decent-sized handful of people who would prefer to control us all and take away all of our freedoms. I posit that this is true in part because most people adapt to the system that surrounds them unless it is truly horrible. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, people are more inclined to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right the forms to which they are accustomed. This apparently apathetic attitude actually helps protect social systems that give people a lot of freedom and subjects them to little control: many people who would have adapted to behave as throat-cutting knife-weilding bandits who took what they needed by force in a world where that was what was available to them aren’t doing that in this world; they are instead showing up at the office and competing with their coworker for the next raise or bonus; and if you draw a knife on them and take their wallet tomorrow, they will turn it over to you and then report you to the police and for the most part retain faith in the overall system that, in general, stops robbery-at-knifepoint from being lucrative while rewarding behaviors such as theirs. Even if you, personally, don’t get caught by the police after they report you.

Now, astro, let’s consider those condos you were going to build on the land you have decided is “yours”. No one is going to stop you from building them, I guess. Some people who had come together in meetings and arranged beforehand to do something different with that land might not appreciate it, but the general attitude is that you are antisocial and uncooperative and so folks are going to let you build your condos and they are going to leave you alone.

a) You are going to build your condos by yourself with your own two hands. We will assume that you are successful in simply appropriating whatever building materials you need by showing up and carting it away with you, but you’ll do all that yourself as well.

b) You will hook up the electrical and the water and the sewage lines and other services with no help from anyone else either. People will probably watch you to observe what you do, in part to see if you do anything destructive of everyone else’s arrangements, but for now we’ll say that no one uncouples any connections that you manage to successfully establish.

c) So one fine day you have condos. I don’t think anyone would willingly live in them, since they can live in spaces they helped plan and build, and your reputation is pretty far out there (you are by now a bit of a pariah, a curiosity-arousing nut), but you are welcome to live in your condos yourself.

d) You have described them as “commercial” and “business” condos. Further explication of those foreign adjectives is needed at this time. “Commerce” and “business” are social constructs that function in this world as anarchic arrangements. We aren’t using a money system and there exists nothing that corrpesponds to “profit” as you know it. We build our own condos for each other, and our hot rods and concert grand pianos and multi-processor computers as well.
Now back to the interim – in a world in which pre-anarchic social systems still exist, they would exist to an extent everywhere, if only because people not using the anarchic system as their solution to good and services are probably still using something akin to currency. And an “office” or two representing the “official presence” of the anarchic collectivity as an incorporated body would probably remain to interface with social systems that operate from a “person in charge” scheme for as long as it remained necessary.

A final comment:

You can’t impose an anarchy. It cannot come into existence as a result of the overthrow of some other social system. A representative democracy perhaps can (although it is not always successful. If the citizenry don’t comprehend their new freedoms and don’t do the ‘eternal vigilance’ thing, a new police state can quickly reemerge later on), but an anarchy pretty much would have to replace other systems by outstripping them in efficiency while coexisting with them. People aren’t going to give up what this system can bring them unless something better is available for them to choose, on an ongoing basis, until after awhile the old system dies off from disuse.

42

I thought it was fairly obvious that the “condo’s” comment was an humorous aside as what “I” would do with a piece of land. It would be useless to consider “ownership” of a chunk of land in the the societal environment described for the reasons I mentioned in the aforesaid post. I apologize for not making my humourous intent more evident.
In any case with respect to your final comment

I don’t disagree at all your point that people will tend to choose the form of social organization that yields them the greatest benefits. Side by side with modern humans as social actors, the productive efficiency of hierarchal forms of social organization would most certainly outstrip the productivity of anarchic forms of organization by orders of magnitude.

I do not agree that an anarchic civilization could exist, except in theory, until the inborn nature of man changes. If an anarchic civilization is far enough in the future that it would dovetail with these requisite changes then perhaps this is a possibility. Seeing as this would likely be at least an eon or ten out into the future I’ll leave that possibility to the future.

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Not a chance. It would take longer for an anarchic system to ramp up to full efficiency.

You could get a completely totalitarian factory running quicker than you could establish a modern semi-centralized company with professionals having a lot of free rein within their area of expertise, but at some point you’d see a cross-over and the more flexible modern system, where good ideas have more room to flourish, and where decisions can be made and implemented locally rather than everyone sitting with a thumb up their ass until specifically told by Da Boss what to do, would outstrip the totalitarian system from that point onward.

An anarchic system would alleviate much of the gross inefficincy which still plagues even the best of hierarchical business organization; it would be more flexible, it would have better interwoven communication that would channel according to need and once it had developed and matured it would outstrip the hierarchical system.

Were this not so, it would never catch on.

44

Yeah, AHunter3, but who’s going to clean the toilets?
Seriously.
Not me.
Peace,
mangeorge

45

Yes, successful companies do this all the time (ie “modern semi-centralized company”) in the quite hierarchal, quasi-democratic capitalist societies most SDMB members reside within. This “modern semi-centralized company” point in your posited anarchy to totalitarianism hierarchal control continuum, is certainly more efficient overall than the totalitarian end but your example does not prompt the logical conclusion that going all the way to the anarchic end is going to become continuously more efficient. Given the requisite, highly distributed, non-linear nature of anarchic societies it suggests rather the opposite conclusion, that anarchic societies will be incredibly inefficient at producing anything but the most basic goods.

Your description sounds a cross between a bad dot.com advertisment and some of the old “Just wait…it’ll be great when it matures” arguments for Marxism I used to hear from sociology and philosophy grad students in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

I don’t know if you are a worker bee, professional academic, butcher, baker, candlestick maker or what your precise background is but you need to take or re-take some basic econ courses that would instruct you in the realities of what it takes to build things like MRI scanners, jet airplanes, space craft or power plants etc. These things sit at the top of huge, complex, hierarchically driven pyramids of research, manufacturing, distribution and production. The notion that people are going to spontaneously “come together” sans any kind of controlling authority, in enlightened self interest and be able to coordinate all the myriad activities required to accomplish these things without some kind of hierarchal process control system saying, “you do this and you do that and do it JUST THIS WAY or else”, is beyond silly, it’s simply absurd.

And I’m not calling it “absurd” based on the fact, that as you said in a previous post, “Can’t happen cuz it ain’t never been so”, I am, however, making the second claim you proposed. “Wouldn’t work, just ain’t practical”. If someone tells me they’re going to build a rocket ship to the moon made out of jellybeans I would have the same response. People are often by nature lazy and contrary creatures and the notion that complex, scientific and/or highly technical industrial achievements can occur in the absence of a unified controlling system with the power to enforce directives of goals to be achieved is nonsense.
QUOTE]*Originally posted by AHunter3 *
**

I suppose we’ll see in time.