Who decides what committees there are? Suppose I want a Christianity committee because I believe that it is important that Christian values are part of our new community. Who decides if there is even such a committee?
If the people decide by spontaneously joining or creating one, does the proportional vote then allow my Christian committee to outvote the Islamic or Jewish committee giving them nothing?
I guess I just don’t understand. So we have a community of 100 people. According to the proposal, each citizen can join whichever one single committee they choose to join and may only vote on matters specific to that issue (e.g. members of the education committee can only make decisions on education) but your modified proposal allows a proportional vote from the committees to allocate resources as a whole.
So suppose the membership is thus: 30 Education, 25 Health, 20 Trade, 18 Defense, 4 Christian, 2 Islamic, 1 Jewish. Can the members of the Education committee allocate 85% (or indeed 100%) of the community resources to education? Can the Christian committee demand that the only religious belief allowed is Christianity (and remember, the atheists or those of other religions just joined a different committee)? How does it work?
And if you start allowing cross voting on these issues, say you realize that religion is a different beast, so you allow all members to vote on religious issues, aren’t you just enacting a democracy? That is, unless there is a supreme ruler who designates which committees can even exist.
My suggestion was more “each committee gets a part of the ressources strictly proportional to its size (which they can decide to hand away to a different committee if they want)” ; but a general assembly could work as well of course.
That’s impossible to enact non-coercively, so, sure, they can try. And then they get to fuck right off.
Though I don’t really see what the point of a religious committee would be - they’re already communities of their own, and their existence doesn’t benefit anybody not in them so selling any religion as a community benefit is a tough sell IMO.
Anarchy is a form of direct democracy. That’s not all it is or involves, but yeah.
By what mechanism does “everyone” decide which committees there will be? If my #1 issue is combating drunkenness in public places, can I form a committee just for that purpose or will I be told to join the crime committee or the alcoholic beverage control committee? By what mechanism will I be permitted or denied the right to form the committee?
ETA: And just because for whatever idiosyncrasies I have, the fact that I believe public drunkenness is so important, it means that I get absolutely zero say on how my kids are educated, the health care plan, the trade policy, etc.? Zero? What if I have strong expertise in education, but my preferred issue is something else? Society gets no benefit from my expertise?
I think that is a poor method of allocating resources. Just because X% of society thinks an idea is the most important, it doesn’t follow that X% of society’s resources should go to that. Costs of different things vary and are not proportional to the belief of citizens that they are most important.
Who enforces the rule that everyone acts non-coercively? Who has the power to tell the Christian group to “fuck right off.” Isn’t forcing someone to fuck off coercive? To whom would they apply to convince that their view that society is benefited by religion and that their committee should exist?
This hypothetical anarchist society looks simply like direct democracy and nothing more. What is the more in this system?
Votes ? General assemblies ? Bear in mind, I’m not the one who suggested the arrangement (I’m more of a “large federation of semi-autonomous micro-communes” type anarchist). However :
If that’s your #1 issue right now, how do you put if forward ? How do you get Things Done about it ?
You don’t, by and large. You can call or mail city hall, or the Governor, or your federal congresscritter, and they’ll politely ignore you while smiling and thanking you for your valuable contribution. End of.
Anarchists, btw, tend to be very big on praxis, “being the change”. If your #1 issue is combatting public drunkenness, do something about it today. Get out there, talk to people about it, organize, write about it, open a halfway house or a lemonade stand…
Hence the “and can opt to give part of their funding to another committee”. People aren’t idiots, or rather people ARE idiots but they’re no worse idiots than the monkeys in government who approve funding right now.
No. Much like not tolerating the intolerant, it is a paradox only at the most superficial level. The goal of anarchy (well, one of its goals) is to eradicate violence from society altogether. Which allows the use of violence against those who would commit violence to begin with. Forcing a religion on someone or restricting the religious freedom of another person is a violent act, cannot be done without implicit violence.
So they get to fuck off, politely at first, then less politely should they persist.
Every anarchist has his or her own ideal. Anarchy is a sea, individual anarchists are fish. Get your read on, several suggestions have already been made upthread.
Let me note in passing that the concept of positive and negative freedoms, often associated with the conservative liberal and CIA recruiter Isaiah Berlin, was first put forward by the anarchist Bakunin in the middle of the 19th century. One writer has gone as far as to suggest Berlin took the idea from Bakunin without bothering to credit him. Further, most of the arguments against anarchism in this thread were made and refuted more than 100 years ago: while anarchist thought has evolved, its critics have not.
Let us explore the possibility there is a difference between “government” and “administration.” Perhaps this analysis will help:
WOMAN: We don’t have a lord.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I told you. We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
ARTHUR: Yes.
DENNIS: But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS: By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,–
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: --but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more–
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN: Order, eh – who does he think he is?
ARTHUR: I am your king!
WOMAN: Well, I didn’t vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don’t vote for kings.
Adam Smith didn’t compute systems of differential equations to simulate monetary flows in an economy or solve for a price vector giving a general equilibrium, but even so, large portions of modern economics can be seen as a generalization and clarification of what he was trying to describe. I’d say he does pretty well with profit.
Still, I see how this is arguable. It depends on how formalized and explicit we demand explanations to be.
A tautological assertion is not a “demonstration”.
The two things are almost exactly opposites. A demonstration comes at the end of a logical argument. It isn’t something assumed axiomatically to be true at the beginning, as Marx does when declaring by fiat that all “value”, under his idiosyncratic definition of that word, comes from labor.
And this is just silly.
If a person wants to complain of critics not having evolved for a hundred years, it might be a good move to avoid relying on false 19th century criticisms of economics in the same thread.
Those wishing to learn more about radical critiques of mainstream economics—the two fields really do ask very different questions about the meaning and aims and nature of “economics” and the good society—may want to look at the work of Michael Hudson; Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics; Jonathan Aldred, Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us; Stephen Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community. A useful introduction to Marx that demonstrates the labour theory of value is not a tautology—a critique of Marx he addressed himself in different editions of Capital—is Wayne Price, The Value of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy.
A common technique of the Austrian “anarcho-capitalists” that visit here on occasion is the lengthy, empty citation of extensive partisan libraries.
We’ve actually seen it many times on the boards, dozens of libertarian books listed by an ideologue who only reads people they predominantly agree with. Echo chamber. If a point is mentioned in the partisan library, then it has been successfully “refuted” in their minds. Never mind that if they try to discuss mainstream thought, they can’t actually manage to do it. Never mind that their moral intuitions don’t match that of most of the rest of the population.
They don’t know what other people think, because they don’t actually listen to anyone who fairly represents a viewpoint outside of their bubble.
But I’ll give those Austrian an-caps one point in their favor. They almost always make a sincere attempt to explain their silly ideas, in addition to dropping their circle-jerk list of books. The explication is never intelligent. But it’s clear that they are deeply, even religiously, sincere, and they put in some minimum effort to share their good news. That’s more than some others can say.
My thanks to those in this thread who have genuinely tried to explain what they believe, rather than hand-waving the task away. I still have no understanding of anarchism, but the attempt at least is appreciated.
