How to do such a thing is a completely legitimate topic. I don’t pretend to have full working blueprints and it might turn out there’s simply no way to get complicated stuff done efficiently without “someone in charge”.
I don’t have much interest in “discussing” it with someone whose idea of “discussion” is to keep saying “won’t work, can’t work, never happen”, but reciprocally I should not ask you to accept pie in the sky without some way to keep the pie up there in the sky.
I get what you’re saying, but some hypotheticals are so absurd, or at least so *apparently *absurd to most, that they seem to require some degree of defense or explanation. Or else we’re just talking about sci-fi. That’s fine, but it seems that anarchism is proposed as a real thing.
Another problem with this discussion is that anarchists seem to have their own unique language. Do anarchists disavow violence? Well, at least according to the page linked above, hierarchy, economics, and property are forms of violence. They definitely disavow that. But burning down a ski resort or department store is, I guess, not violence. Presumably because they disavow the existence of these things in the first place.
Anarchists are welcome to design their own little language, but they shouldn’t expect to convince many people of their ideas if they say things that imply arson is not violence. Argument by definition is never very convincing. I guess the problem is that if they used clearer language, they might be even less convincing.
Fucking hilarious. So you are openly admitting that your anarchist society could not come up with ways to:
Ensure that we are prepared for the next pandemic, which may not be a respiratory virus.
Transition to a renewable energy system. (Which may or may not include nuclear power plants. Who decides!?)
Deal with foreign non-anarchist nations like China.
Keep electricity, water, and internet going into cities, suburbs, and rural areas.
Ensure that the food and medicine people consume is safe and effective.
Of course you don’t. All you have is a vague inchoate dislike of Authority. Yeah man, the pigs suck. Hey, you got any more weed?
You don’t have me “on ignore” but you sure aren’t paying attention. yawn
No worries. I knew you weren’t proposing anything serious. Have a good night.
BTW, I don’t use the ignore function, so not sure what you meant.
ETA: I am simply asking some basic questions and you are admitting that you have no answers.
Even apes form hierarchical groups, the Anarchists notions of “no hierarchies” are the highest flying of their pipe dreams.
Hierarchies are inherent to the nature of a species that doesn’t come into existence fully formed, i.e. the parents command their toddler not to stuff their mouth with dirt, and the existence of time, folks that have been around longer will, usually, know better than ones that haven’t accumulated as much learning and experience.
The no state control bit only was present from the time of the primordial soup up to the late Neolitic at most, where apes with airs transitioned into complex societies bigger than what a monkeysphere could hold together.
Up until then humans lived in the closest thing to actual anarchy that can be manifested in reality, that worked while the panorama was small groups stuck in the hunter gatherer game, and even then there was the basis for the need to a non anarchic world, if hunter gathering groups decided to enforce ownership over a resource to the detriment of other groups; and of course the most expedient way to force one group to stop sharing resources is to clobber every last one of them to death.which is extremely convenient to do when there isn’t a higher authority enforcing rules against massacring people.
That sucked, and the way to address the brutality of an anarchic world that was getting to crowded for comfort was the emergence of rules and people vested with the power to enforce those rules.
he anarchist utopia can only be realized when there are few enough people around so that cohesive groups are composed of at most a few hundred people and those groups are scattered enough so they would not conflict over resources.
So while they may wax poetic about noble ideals the reality is humanity’s clock would had to be reset to at least 5000 BC or thereabouts, by throwing everyone in, at best, subsistence existence, and wiping out several billions of people of the face of the Earth.
I, for one, would take a pass on that big idea.
This is what I’m talking about, an Anarchist world (and if would have to be the whole world in on it) would not be able to create or sustain those things. The only way it works is if we are reduced to the state where everyone was a hunter gatherer or limited to small scale subsistence economy and spread very thinly over the land.
For your first point, I’d just love to see how an Anarchist envisions their ideal world dealing with that; and I don’t mean something like forming a committee and saying everyone stay home. I mean how their society would be able to produce medicines and medical equipment as what is available today.
Take ventilators, how would their world produce just the electronics needed to run them? From the scientific research in a myriad of areas (from geology to mathematics and everything in between) to the mind boggling complexity of semiconductor manufacturing, to linking the global network of supply that brings everything together to create an ant sized lump of semiconductors that knows how to keep a person’s blood oxygenated.
I’ve never hear anyone espousing this ideas who seems to have a clue of the complexity of the structures keeping the world ticking as it is today, let alone how putting an end to them (and replace them with wishful thinking) would result in the deaths of billions through starvation and disease.
Stupid anarchists, wanting humans to be better than apes…
well, if I have no choice but to act like an ape, I hope I get to be a bonobo, at least.
Or when we attain a universal post-scarcity society.
I don’t recall ever hearing an Anarchist lay down a realistic way to create a post-scarcity society before having everyone jump in their hobbyhorse.
What I do hear is akin to wanting to leap off a cliff and then work out the right arm-flapping technique to fly away.
The scaling up problem isn’t about reputation.
A gang of 100 guys with swords can push around 700 without swords. The bushi don’t need to care about their reputation among grovelling, weaponless peasants.
Because coercion is where people disagree.
If you want to convince people, you need to convince them on the area where they disagree. Reputation systems are trivial compared to the problem of coercion.
Then… you concede the argument?
Because this is the issue where most of us get tripped up.
Is there a way to deal with a hundred guys with swords who want to bully everyone else around – or a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand – without creating your own army? In order to win the inevitable battle, you need to create a new class of people who are capable of winning. To be capable of winning, they need to specialize in violence. You can’t have a thousand generals. They need a sufficiently sophisticated hierarchical structure that they can organize effectively and actually win that fight against the army of bullies that is coming. But then you’ve created a group of people who specialize in violence, work in a hierarchical structure, and are fully accustomed to taking orders from their superior officers. And, oh yeah. They will expect to be compensated by the rest of society for providing the dangerous service of protecting everyone else. They will want a reward for that. And they’re now the ones with swords, and who know how to use those swords.
Once you let that genie out of the bottle, I don’t see how it gets put back in. The single most important property of a state is its claimed monopoly on violence.
I don’t personally read much about anarchism, so maybe I’ve missed something, but I can’t say I’ve seen anybody take this problem seriously. It’s not about reputation. It’s about how you defend your society from the tragically inevitable gang of bullies who will find each other almost immediately and spring forth into a hierarchical terror organization that will need to be dealt with, if you don’t want them to take over and seize everything.
It isn’t always in my best interest to cooperate. Sometimes it is in my best interest to grab what I want.
IOW, in your hypothetical, it requires that everyone cooperates. And that doesn’t happen. Some people are sociopaths, or selfish, or care more about themselves than anyone else, or see that they can get more for themselves by taking than by cooperating. And so, in the absence of differential authority, where some people are authorized to use force to enforce the stability of a society, the selfish or sociopathic use force to set themselves up to use force to compel others to work, not for the benefit of all, but to run the society the way they want.
Who gives a damn what the other seven think? I’ve got a gun - if you ignore me, I shoot one of you and see how that affects your behavior. Or else I don’t bother going fishing with you at all - I wait for you on shore with guns and some of my friends and take what I want.
I acquire a reputation of someone who better be obeyed or you get shot. I don’t care if you like me or not - I got lots of friends who like me because we split up the goods, or because we are related, or because we think we are better than the rest of you and are entitled to it.
So either you use coercion to stop me, and then you got a structure that relies on a hierarchy of differential authority, of people over other people. Or you don’t, in which case there’s still a structure that relies on a hierarchy of differential authority, of people over other people, but with me and mine in charge.
So we don’t need to change human nature - just revoke the second law of thermodynamics.
Regards,
Shodan
In addition to what others have said: Most people have common sense. That’s why we are able to have functioning societies.
If I just don’t get it and keep drinking all of the beer, never chipping in to pay for the boat docking fee, and act like a complete dick, then the seven of you will agree that I can’t come on fishing trips with you guys anymore. Then you have a hierarchical structure: the seven of you on top and me on the bottom.
And maybe the seven of you are split. Four want to tell me to fuck right off and three want to have a talk with me and give me another chance with money up front. So you vote. Then you have more hierarchical structure: The Four vs. Three v. Me.
We don’t have laws against murder because most people would otherwise murder. The laws are there to stop outlier behavior, i.e. the people without “common sense.” That’s the point I think you are missing. We are not saying that without coercion, everyone, or even most people would violate social norms. But a significant and non-trivial amount would.
They do it now even in “oppressive” societies. People are still assholes on fishing trips. You can get a lethal injection or life in prison for murder, but people still do it. Why would they not do it in your society?
Bloody revolution seems to be the preferred way.
That, or finally cracking fusion and ubiquitous at-home manufacturing. Potayto, potahto.
What about post-scarcity breaches the 2nd law?
Are you under the impression we live in a closed system?
At this point I want to remember that the original debate was about anarcho-syndicalism. Which did lay down a realistic non-violent way to create an anarchist society: through syndicalism.
I’d be happy to participate in a discussion about how to structure one, and/or how to get from here to there, if there were some way to bracket off all the “can’t do it, won’t work, nyaah nyaah na nyaaah nyaah” crosstalk. Easy enough to just ignore them, I suppose (?)… can those familiar with this syndicalism thing describe its structure as you understand it?
I can also absent myself from dissenting from the conviction that syndicalism is a way, or the best way, to implement anarchy, if you don’t want my voice saying “naah, wouldn’t work” or “here’s a better way” or whatever… either way, I’d like to hear more about syndicalism.
You’re looking for a high level discussion of one. Well, everything works at a high level. It’s easy to sweep all the pesky details under the rug as irrelevant.
Personally, I like looking at the details. And if a system can’t handle the simplest one, independently of the exact high-level arrangement, then maybe there’s something wrong with it.
The link above cites this example regarding bus driving:
City bus #68 was making its rounds one particularly sunny spring day, when the driver slammed on the brakes at an intersection. “Fuck this,” he swore in angry Catalan, and, opening the bus doors, stomped out into the sunshine.
…
For a full minute, the riders sat in stupefied silence. A couple stood up and got off the bus themselves. Then, from the back of the bus, a woman with the appearance of a huge cannon ball and an air of unconquerable self-possession stepped forward. Without a word, she sat down in the driver’s seat, and put the engine in gear. The bus continued on its route, stopping at its customary stops, until the woman arrived at her own and got off.
Already, this is problematic. Bus drivers have special licenses for a reason; it’s harder than driving a car and there is more at stake, both inside and outside the bus. But maybe we can accept those losses for the sake of bus driver anarchy–it probably wouldn’t be *too *bad. We let people drive giant RVs without a special license and they’re pretty big too (of course, I’m leaving out the discussion about how anyone here has a driver’s license).
But what about airplanes? Large ships? If the pilot or captain leaves, do we just let anyone step in? Is there even a pilot, or does one of the passengers have to volunteer in the first place? What if an unlikely-looking passenger steps up, but the other passengers recognize that they probably won’t live through the experience with him at the yoke? Can they restrain him, with violence if necessary?
The author of that manifesto presumably thought that was an excellent example of anarchy in action (in a section titled “But Who Will Take out the Garbage?”), but it seems to blow over in a stiff breeze.
Really, it sounds like you want a work of fiction, where you can sorta ignore all the plot holes and in any case the story moves to quickly to get bogged down in details. I’d recommend Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, which describes the beginnings of an anarchic, post-scarcity society that develops and separates from a kind of dystopic future version of our current society. Sex and gender stuff is also a lot freer in the new society.
I’ve often thought that one meaningful step forward would be if we kept Congress as it is with respect to how its members get elected and their role in writing and introducing bills and making speeches from the floor in support or opposition therof; but at a certain set time all the registered voting citizens get to vote.
Even that, obviously, is rife with ways in which the process could be badly subverted, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that it could be done right. I’m sure there would still be swaths of the citizenry who simply don’t care to educate themselves and/or to be responsible enough to bother to give a shit and cast a vote. What percent of the eligible folks do you think would get in the habit of following along and making a choice and casting a vote?
Also, what effect do you think it would have on the user-friendliness of the language used? Would legal precision be at risk as the tradeoff though?
I’ve played a lot with consensus-based decision-making structures, too. Where instead of a majority-rules vote, some (if not all) the decisions made require universal agreement. I’ve been a part of organizations that actually did that. From which, two immediate observations: yes, that takes it out of the hypothetical-only zone and lets us discard “impossible”. But, secondly, oh hell is it ever exhausting. Biggest problem I saw was the “we don’t have consensus today about whether or not we really reached consensus last Tuesday” issue.
After six+ months of participating in such meetings, I proposed to the organization in question that we use a hierarchy of how permanent a given consensus-based decision is. We could upvote a decision that appeared to all involved to have proven itself a good one, and, by doing so, we would invoke protections for that decision against arbitrary, mood-du-jour reversals. It would still be possible for a consensus to unmake such decisions but we’d require scheduling discussion of it and publicizing it, demoting it (by consensus) to a lower level in order to make it an appropriate topic for being reversed, and then dismantling it or modifying it as people could agree on.
I proposed several stair-step levels of permanence with the notion that it would give consensus-based decisions a dependable framework instead of everything being up-in-the-air at all times.
Do you think that would be compatible with your own notions of anarchic process?
You seem to be talking here about direct democracy, not anarchism. Anarchists don’t seem to particularly like democracy.
At any rate, California does this stuff with its proposition system. We get well-written pamphlets describing the proposition in question. As well as a lot of poor information written by lobbying groups and distributed in the mail.
All in all it’s a terrible system leading to things like banning gay marriage (later struck down as unconstitutional), a proliferation of bond measures, a broken-ass property tax system, and other things. California manages to survive it but it’s hardly a point in favor of direct democracy. A significant portion of the population doesn’t manage to figure out whether they’re voting for or against a certain thing on any given proposition.