Anarchy

[AHunter3]

We don’t need any departments. What we need are communications structures and structures of decisions-made and decisions-under-consideration. As long as they do not rely on a hierarchy of people in authority over other people, it’s still anarchy.

We don’t need a money system either. What we need are communications structures that allow people to plan and ask for and receive help from each other, and to find interesting/challenging things to do with their time.

A true government of the people consists of people not governors.

[DSeid]

Maybe a poll here?

Is your view of human nature dangerously naive or tragically pessimistic?

Orwell pegs it well in several books, including Animal Farm.

[AHunter3]

Naaah. You don’t need compellingly good human nature to get a functioning anarchy. Moderately enlightened self-interest will do.

[hansel]

This seems like an excellent place to link Clay Shirky’s essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

AHunter3, it’s all well and good to replace hierarchy with channels of communication, but you’ve said nothing about how the group defends itself against backsliders and grifters and those who are just plain unsatisfied with the results and want to change how things are done to a less anarchic method.

I would argue that we have already seen an anarchist society: Usenet, which is a filthy place where the good citizens are overwhelmed with the tasks of keeping it minimally useful.

[Roger_Mexico]

*Originally posted by Latro *
**I always thought the communards were, as the name implies, communists.
In 1871 the Germans did not join the French to fight the communards, they stopped the fight so the French army could come in and restore order.

As Orwell describes in “Homage to Catalonia” (good book, btw) there was a slow infiltration and take-over by the Stalinist into the hotch-potch of various communist and anarchist units. The P.O.U.M. (Orwell’s international brigade IIRC) was eventually disbanded. Again, I don’t recall any case where the fascists joined with the communists to fight other groups. **

The Paris Commune was definitely anarchist. Here is a good article about it:

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchism/writers/anarcho/commune.html

People who live in a commune are not necessarily “communist” any more than people that communicate in communities are “communist.” The fact that the Franco-Prussian war was stopped to allow France to crush an anarchist commune indicates the cooperation of the imperialist war-mongers against their own people.

The situation in Barcelona, but the Stalinists definitely cooperated with the fascists and capitalists to crush the anarchist movement. Stalin did not want a worker’s revolution to succeed in Spain because he was busy crushing the Russian revolution.

The Spanish Revolution Betrayed

[Gotterfunken]

*Originally posted by Roger_Mexico *
**The brutal repression of anarchist communes is incredible. During the 1868 Paris commune, France and Prussia were fighting the aptly named Franco-Prussian war. The troops from both sides got together to bloodily wipe out the communards. Likewise during the Spanish Civil War, the fascists and the communists got together to wipe out the anarchists. Thats when Orwell was thrown in jail; he wrote about it in Homage to Catalonia. **

*Originally posted by Roger_Mexico *
**The brutal repression of anarchist communes is incredible. During the 1868 Paris commune, France and Prussia were fighting the aptly named Franco-Prussian war. The troops from both sides got together to bloodily wipe out the communards. **

It was the 1871 Commune, not 1868, and the Franco-Prussian War had already ended with France’s defeat. The Germans allowed the National Assembly to reconstitute itself at Versailles while Paris was left in the hands of the Parisian Communards. They did not actively assist the National Assembly troops from suppresing the Commune, though they didn’t do anything to stop them either.

I don’t know that the Communards implemented anything like a coherent anarchist system–they barely had time to, anyway (the Commune only lasted two months). Their episode was memorialized by anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin and Bakunin. Marx and Engels offered a more critical, but still laudatory perspective in “The Civil War in France”.

Just some helpful readings.

[Latro]

The Paris Commune was definitely anarchist. Here is a good article about it:

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/an...ho/commune.html

Duh! That’s an anarchist website, do you have something a bit more historical. Too tired to read that one.

indicates the cooperation of the imperialist war-mongers against their own people.

Whatever that means (you should un-learn some of that slogan speek), it was not :‘The troops from both sides got together to bloodily wipe out the communards.’
Did read the other one. Which rather confirms what I remembered about the Stalinist take-over. Couldn’t find the bit where ‘fascists and the communists got together to wipe out the anarchists.’
You sure it’s in that article?

[AHunter3]

hansel:

AHunter3, it’s all well and good to replace hierarchy with channels of communication, but you’ve said nothing about how the group defends itself against backsliders and grifters and those who are just plain unsatisfied with the results and want to change how things are done to a less anarchic method.

Anarchy can and by necessity must be able to coexist with non-anarchic forms of organized human social behavior, and its participants are “defended” against those other forms mostly through the greater efficiency of anarchy at making people happy. That removes the motivation of the backsliders.

You don’t need to “destroy the system” first and then set up anarchy. To anyone promising you that, I think you should say as the Beatles did: “you can count me out”. Sounds a lot more like a recipe for implementing a centralized dictatorship in fact. Insofar as anarchy attempts to improve on the degree of democracy present in our existing systems, and our existing systems enforce themselves mostly through gentle persuasion and the lure of their rewards (and punish mainly those violators who engage in less anarchic activities such as direct coercion of other citizens at knifepoint), it could go a long way before the ensconced powers-that-be even noticed its existence on their radar screens. Anarchy is not illegal. In fact, for the moment you don’t even have the Family Values folks up in arms about it.

Nope, anarchy’s main adversary at the moment is the failure of its own proponents to take it seriously enough to play with structure and mechanisms and get some experiments up and running.

[Latro]

*Originally posted by AHunter3 *
Nope, anarchy’s main adversary at the moment is the failure of its own proponents to take it seriously enough to play with structure and mechanisms and get some experiments up and running.

Oooh, ooh!
Can I rephrase that as “Anarchy’s main adversary at the moment is the anarchy amongst its own proponents.” Can I?
Please?

[msmith537]

*Originally posted by AHunter3 *
We don’t need any departments. What we need are communications structures and structures of decisions-made and decisions-under-consideration. As long as they do not rely on a hierarchy of people in authority over other people, it’s still anarchy.
**

A beurocracy by any other name…

[Jojo]

Soup_Du_Jour said:

Anyway, in my opinion, it is clear that anarchy wouldn’t be sustainable. The obnoxiously vast majority of ancient civilizations had heiarchical systems of government. Some were dictatorships in various forms. Some were limited democracies, like in Greece. There were clans in Britannia. Tribes in North America. Any great civilizations that were anarchies? No.

Empirically, for societies to progress, anarchy simply doesn’t work.

You are looking backwards. I don’t understand why.

Of course primitive peoples formed tribes, so what? Anarchy is a thing of the future not a thing of the past. We have not developed sufficiently yet to implement anarchy, no society ever has, except on small scales.

AHunter3 said:

Anarchy can and by necessity must be able to coexist with non-anarchic forms of organized human social behavior

Yes, this is the crucial thing to bear in mind. Anarchy can co-exist with anything - that’s the whole point. Anarchy threatens no one and cannot be threatened by anything.

The basic unit of society is one human. One human. Everything else that you have learnt is extraneous. This includes politics, religion, economics etc etc. If you wish to be religious (for example) then fine, but you are still one human.

One human is the basic unit. At the moment there are 6 billion units on the planet.

Everything you have ever learnt is wrong.

For example, there is no such thing as a “country”. Countries are just lines on a map drawn by powerful humans, powerful units. Yet no one unit is more powerful than any other unit. All units are equal.

This is the basic condition of mankind. We are each a unit and all units are equal. Anarchy simply recognises that fact.

Anarchy is superior to all other political theories. In fact, anarchy isn’t even a political theory. It is simply a recognition of the truth that already exists. This “truth” has been suppressed for as long as there have been humans (except maybe at the very beginning).

You can only suppress truth for so long. Eventually it will find a way to come into the light. We are all anarchists, it’s just that some of us don’t realise it yet.

[Lemur866]

But Ahunter3, isn’t the money system already a decentralized economic communication system? One that works better than a feudal in-kind tribute system, or a hunter-gatherer system where everyone produces every good themselves or gets it as a gift? Perhaps there are better ways of organizing a decentralized system of allocating scarce goods, but it seems to me that money is far and away the best system invented yet. If you have another scheme, go ahead and lay it out and we can examine it. Perhaps if we had Star Trek replicators that can produce any good any time on demand for essentially free then we might not really need ANY economic system. But we certainly aren’t even close to such technology.

OK, Jojo, stop ranting and start arguing. If I assert that my pet economic or social theory is superior to others I’m not going to get very far unless I provide some arguments that convince other people. You seem to feel that since anarchy is inevitable there is no need to convince us misguided brainwashed peons. But don’t you think that anarchy only becomes inevitable when the vast majority of humanity is convinced it is desirable? And that the best way for you to make that happen is to start right now convincing the people right here on this message board it is desirable?

The basic question is, how do you prevent me fashioning a pointy stick, or a board with a nail in it, going over to the place where you hang out and bashing your head in because you looked at me funny or I want the pretty rocks near your house?

And what do you do when I convince 250 million of my closest friends to do the same thing, and we all dress the same, march together, and develop bigger and bigger boards with nails in them? And we decide to go over to other places and start hitting everyone there over the head with our boards, until they agree to give us all their pretty rocks, and wash our dishes, and give us oral sex?

And what do you do when I agree to wash the dishes tomorrow if you wash the dishes today, but then tomorrow comes and I refuse to wash the dishes? The first thing is that you learn not to make agreements with me, and stop living with me. But how does everyone else in the world learn that every time they make an agreement with me, I break it? And what if my broken agreements are more serious…I agree to deliver such-and-such tons of concrete to the building site, in return for the delicious flibble berries you gave me yesterday. But I don’t show, and I won’t return the berries, and you can’t build the house, and now the person you agreed to build the house for is annoyed, since he played the piano for you the other day, but now you can’t fulfill your agreement with him?

In short, any society has to deal with three main problems. External threats, for which we have a military. Internal threats, for which we have police. And enforcement of contracts and property rights, for which we have the court system.

Sure, we can imagine a libertarian system where those functions are privatized, or handled by custom. As an example of custom, there are many parts of the world that while they are de jure controlled by some state or another are de facto under the control of various tribes. There is no state, but there are–say–Sharia courts, there are tribal patriarchs, there are customs so strong that they appear to be laws of nature.

But how exactly is that different–in practice–from handling it through government? If people are taught not to hit each other on the head, that is social control, even if there are no explicit consequences other than social disapproval for hitting people on the head. Social disapproval can be a draconian method of social organization as anyone who attended high school can attest. Here is a social system that is not organized hierarchicly, or capitalistically, or by the state…and yet the students can be complete bastards to each other. Sure, they are in the context of our brainwashed phallocratic xenophobic death-worshipping speciesist power state. But removing the state doesn’t remove the bastardy.

The long history of planet earth is the history of people being bastards to each other. The history of progess on planet earth is finding contexts where people have incentives not to be bastards to each other, or to find contexts where it doesn’t matter quite as much if other people are bastards. Capitalism, rule of law, democracy. Those are good things.

Personally, I’ve never met a self-styled anarchist who wasn’t an utter bastard at heart, at least from my brainwashed point of view. Typically self-centered, close-minded, arrogant, selfish, spoiled, cranky, and grooving on confrontation. But what do I know…maybe meeting you will prove me wrong, show me that anarchists are mellow, cooperative, helpful, fun-loving, eager to teach and to learn. Or not.

But see, you have a chance to change the perspective of one person today. To paraphrase, no good tree gives bad fruit, and no bad tree gives good fruit, by their fruit shall you know them. If a tree gives bad fruit, it should be cut down and cast into the fire. See what I’m getting at? Snottiness and bombast aren’t going to convince anyone, even if you turn out to be right in the end, not that I believe you are right. But what if you are? See?

[erislover]

*Originally posted by Lemur866 *
But Ahunter3, isn’t the money system already a decentralized economic communication system?

If we discount the fact that there is a lone authoritarian body that dictates what the money supply should be like, then perhaps.

Perhaps there are better ways of organizing a decentralized system of allocating scarce goods, but it seems to me that money is far and away the best system invented yet. If you have another scheme, go ahead and lay it out and we can examine it.

Some anarchists like the idea of competing currencies. Not being schooled in economics, alas, I cannot really say much about the idea, but I like the thought of it FWIW (not much!).

You seem to feel that since anarchy is inevitable there is no need to convince us misguided brainwashed peons.

Can’t speak for Jojo, but I can say that I trust we are already living in anarchy. Are you familiar with that infamous quote that runs something like, “I contest that we are both atheists; when you understand why you have rejected all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours.” Analagously I would say the same of government.

The John Galt of anarchists once mentioned, “government is an illusion in the mind of the governors.”

The basic question is, how do you prevent me fashioning a pointy stick, or a board with a nail in it, going over to the place where you hang out and bashing your head in because you looked at me funny or I want the pretty rocks near your house?

How is that done now? — the threat of force against you? I find it hard to believe that all that stands between you murdering someone is a few scribbles on paper. And I find it even harder to believe that the only thing preventing you from killing people at random (or with purpose) is the thought of the State’s retribution.

Perhaps I overestimate your qualities. Would you care to comment?

But how exactly is that different–in practice–from handling it through government?

The same way pent-up sex is different in practice from rape. If you think sex is only about thrusting, then you are missing the larger picture.

If people are taught not to hit each other on the head, that is social control, even if there are no explicit consequences other than social disapproval for hitting people on the head.

No anarchist that takes the topic seriously thinks that there wouldn’t be implicit mechanism present in any group of people dictating behavior. They do think that there wouldn’t be a/an [appointed, elected, in place by force] figure with the authority to decide such things.

Social disapproval can be a draconian method of social organization as anyone who attended high school can attest. Here is a social system that is not organized hierarchicly, or capitalistically, or by the state…and yet the students can be complete bastards to each other.

I don’t know about your high school, but mine had a very obvious hierarchy that did in fact extend right from the local school board all the way down to the lowly fat nerd.

Sure, they are in the context of our brainwashed phallocratic xenophobic death-worshipping speciesist power state. But removing the state doesn’t remove the bastardy.

Why doesn’t the presence of the state remove it, then, if that is what it is there for?

The long history of planet earth is the history of people being bastards to each other.

Then you can see that democracy is no solution to that. Or need we ask various peoples of the Americas who felt the loving touch of democratic policies?

The history of progess on planet earth is finding contexts where people have incentives not to be bastards to each other, or to find contexts where it doesn’t matter quite as much if other people are bastards. Capitalism, rule of law, democracy. Those are good things.

Ask the people with no jobs, in jail for selling drugs to willing participants, and people who have had their vote taken from them even if they are said to be rehabilititated if all these things are so great.

[msmith537]

*Originally posted by erislover *
Some anarchists like the idea of competing currencies. Not being schooled in economics, alas, I cannot really say much about the idea, but I like the thought of it FWIW (not much!).

I don’t think it really matters all that much. And it’s a little more complex than a “lone authority figure deciding what the money supply is like”.

*Originally posted by erislover *
Can’t speak for Jojo, but I can say that I trust we are already living in anarchy.

Patently untrue by any commonly accepted definition of Anarchy.

*Originally posted by erislover *
Are you familiar with that infamous quote that runs something like, “I contest that we are both atheists; when you understand why you have rejected all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours.” Analagously I would say the same of government.

A meaningless comparison.

*Originally posted by erislover *
The John Galt of anarchists once mentioned, “government is an illusion in the mind of the governors.”

Once again…a meaningless statement.

*Originally posted by erislover *
How is that done now? — the threat of force against you? I find it hard to believe that all that stands between you murdering someone is a few scribbles on paper. And I find it even harder to believe that the only thing preventing you from killing people at random (or with purpose) is the thought of the State’s retribution.

Not everyone is like us. People do in fact rob rape and murder even under threat of retribution.

*Originally posted by erislover *
The same way pent-up sex is different in practice from rape. If you think sex is only about thrusting, then you are missing the larger picture.

Once again…a meaningless analogy.

*Originally posted by erislover *
No anarchist that takes the topic seriously thinks that there wouldn’t be implicit mechanism present in any group of people dictating behavior. They do think that there wouldn’t be a/an [appointed, elected, in place by force] figure with the authority to decide such things.

How does one create an implicit mechanism to establish behavior without any figure to enforce it?

*Originally posted by erislover *
Then you can see that democracy is no solution to that. Or need we ask various peoples of the Americas who felt the loving touch of democratic policies?

Democracy is simply a method for the people to influence their government. It is not a cure all for all of mans ills.

*Originally posted by erislover *
Ask the people with no jobs, in jail for selling drugs to willing participants, and people who have had their vote taken from them even if they are said to be rehabilititated if all these things are so great. **

Democracy and capitalism do not create crime any more than smashing houses creates a tordado. There will always be people who will put their own interests ahead of and at the expense of others. Maybe the drug user doesn’t belong in jail but we can certainly find plenty of people who do.
I also offer this link:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

[AHunter3]

Lemur:

But Ahunter3, isn’t the money system already a decentralized economic communication system?

No.

[Soup_du_jour]

From Jojo
You are looking backwards. I don’t understand why.

Science is based on evidence. Political philosophy is as well.

Of course primitive peoples formed tribes, so what? Anarchy is a thing of the future not a thing of the past. We have not developed sufficiently yet to implement anarchy, no society ever has, except on small scales.

Cite a sustained example of an anarchic society. One that can defend itself from outside forces and that can endure for a lengthy period of time without deteriorating.

Yes, this is the crucial thing to bear in mind. Anarchy can co-exist with anything - that’s the whole point. Anarchy threatens no one and cannot be threatened by anything.

Cannot be threatened, except by the global conspiracy of Communists, Fascists, and Capitalists, that is. :rolleyes:

The basic unit of society is one human. One human. Everything else that you have learnt is extraneous. This includes politics, religion, economics etc etc. If you wish to be religious (for example) then fine, but you are still one human.

I disagree. Humans always tend to live in groups.

One human is the basic unit. At the moment there are 6 billion units on the planet.

If you define the human as the basic unit of society. This is a tautology.

Everything you have ever learnt is wrong.

Care to be more specific?

For example, there is no such thing as a “country”. Countries are just lines on a map drawn by powerful humans, powerful units. Yet no one unit is more powerful than any other unit. All units are equal.

Just because something is a human constuct doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Countries and “nation states” are certainly not inherent to the human condition. (Witness pre-European North American native tribal groups. There weren’t clearly defined boundries as such between nations, though there were certainly heiarchical governance. Chiefs and such.) This does not mean that they don’t exist. One could just as well say that language does not exist, as it is just squiggles on a page and sounds from the mouth that powerful units use to disseminate information.

This is the basic condition of mankind. We are each a unit and all units are equal. Anarchy simply recognises that fact.

You just said that there were “powerful units” that imposed boundries upon humanity. Do these powerful units exist or not?

Anarchy is superior to all other political theories. In fact, anarchy isn’t even a political theory. It is simply a recognition of the truth that already exists. This “truth” has been suppressed for as long as there have been humans (except maybe at the very beginning).

I ask you this. Conceptually, can you imagine an individual or group capable of surpressing this “truth” that wasn’t already in a position of power to do so?

You can only suppress truth for so long. Eventually it will find a way to come into the light. We are all anarchists, it’s just that some of us don’t realise it yet.

I am not an anarchist. The absence of government as a governmental system seems utterly unsustainable to me.

[AHunter3]

No one said anything about the absence of government. You can have government by the people of themselves through a hierarchy of permanence of decisions that have been made. You do not need to put people in a hierarchy of authority over other people in order to have government.

C’mon. We’re adults here. We know you can’t have 10 billion people running around as absolute equals and have a functioning society unless you have a structure. We’re just proposing that structure need not make some people subservient to others.

[DSeid]

A few questions:

It was earlier stated that enforcement of standards of behavior would be by the group without heirarchy. How is this practically different from rule by mob action?

It was earlier stated that many actions beneficial to workers owe their start to anarchists. Yet implementation of such actions (shorterwork weeks, worker protections, etc) require a hierarchal structure. In a real world in which production requires coordinated actions by many, how does anarchism ensure such protections?

How would an anarchist society prevent hierarchy from breaking out?

Humans are social beings. Many evolutionary biologists believe that social game playing (cheating, detecting cheaters, and so on) was the main drive for our brain’s growth. Others have used computer simulations to show that societies that have enforcers will be more successful than those without. Societies can exist because individuals accept a common core of axioms to guide behavior (whether these axioms are based on religious bases or secular ones matters not) and subsequently hold its individual members accountable to the rules that follow from those axioms by whatever force is felt needed to accomplish that goal.

Hierarchal structures are nature’s way in any social structure. From ants to lions. To believe that humans can exist in social structures without developing hierarchal structures and enforcement procedures, to believe that anarchy could exist without a hierarchal structure imposing it artificially upon a social populus, is to deny humanity its essential features as part of the natural world.

[hansel]

The problem here is that, despite all the hand-waving by Jojo and Roger_Mexico, it’s still not clear what an anarchist is. Ironically, msmith’s camping analogy makes the most sense to me: individuals who act responsibly as members of a group without threat of reprisal by the group or enforcement of standards by the group.

What’s not clear is how the absence of hierarchy arises, in part or in total, from those individuals, past the scale of a camping trip.

[erislover]

Wow msmith, it is almost like you responded to my post. But lets see if I can pick something out of the rubble.

And it’s a little more complex than a “lone authority figure deciding what the money supply is like”.

Well, anarchy is a little more complicated than “a pipe dream that can never work in reality”. Or a little more complicated than “dog eat dog world with no consequences”. Or any number of things that you will find people think anarchy is all about.

Patently untrue by any commonly accepted definition of Anarchy.

Well, when you get the reference in the sentence you chose to leave out (the one that follows it) you should probably see that wasn’t meant to be taken literally. But I would hate for you to have to read more than one sentence at a time and respond to the concept or concepts contained in them with more than single sentences. Oh, my bad, you did respond to the following sentence:

A meaningless comparison.

The reason I mentioned it was that Lemur indicated talking to others about anarchy wasn’t paramount because anarchy would happen whether or not the brainwashed masses were told about it now (actually I think the word was “peons”). I then made reference to a quote. The conclusion of this, should you be able to actually extrapolate information (a dubious claim at this point in the thread) would be: “When you, anti-anarchist, understand why you have rejected all other forms of government, you will understand why I have rejected yours.”

Once again…a meaningless statement.

That government is an illusion in the mind of the governors? I’ll admit it isn’t a beacon of clarity but it isn’t supposed to be a metaphysical mantra of some sort. The government is there because you serve it, and the governors have the authority they have because enough people think they do. But they have no power at all; at least, nothing significant, for as you note a few "vivisection by vBcode"s later, murders and robberies still happen anyway, don’t they? If we all said, “No more,” what power would the governors (those that govern, not the heads of states) have?

How does one create an implicit mechanism to establish behavior without any figure to enforce it?

The question is malformed. One doesn’t, that’s the point.

Democracy is simply a method for the people to influence their government. It is not a cure all for all of mans ills.

And why do people need to influence their government?

Democracy and capitalism do not create crime any more than smashing houses creates a tordado.

I didn’t mean to suggest they did.