Right–at which point someone gets sliced up and buried under a house, and the situation escalates until rival drug gangs are engaged in decade-long warfare between rival drug gangs. It sounds, from that brief overview, as though the problem finally ended with the victory of the Hell’s Angels; is that accurate? And I remember reading folks talking about visiting Christiana and seeing pretty rough-looking skinheads glowering at them from the, er, hemp stands, suggesting that Christiana has an informal government-by-criminal-gangs; is that accurate?
There is a legitimate question of whether this needed Christiana in order to happen; I don’t have an answer about that. We do need to be careful, however, about thinking that the threat is a single dude with a handgun. As I’ve been saying all along, the threat is really a bunch of dudes with a structure and a bunch of guns.
Indeed, I don’t see how anarchy/ libertarianism/ whatever can come about as long as humans have, in the absence of a government-imposed larger society, a seemingly innate tendency to form tribes. A non-tribal/gang society demands that you forswear vengence against someone who killed your parent/ sibling/ child/ spouse/ best friend, if your loved one was in the wrong and the stranger was in the right.
Again this comes from a misapprehension. It’s a straw man supposition. The basic idea in people’s heads about an Anarchistic society is that it would be more fragmented and with fewer rules. This is not the case. Anarchy means “without rulers”, which has been articulated as a political organization that those who rule are the people themselves. It is a type of democracy that is more organic, local when it’s appropriate based on people affected by decisions and grassroots. Someone else asked why it needs it’s own name if it’s just a democracy. Well for one thing no government type on earth today is a democracy without special stipulations. I’m pretty sure they all have special names like republic, ect.
Libertarianism has many problems, mostly deriving from their position that individuals should never be prevented from doing anything that isn’t on the property of another person or to their property or person. This creates the ability to hoard resources, accumulate power that compromises the entire basis of democracy as we see so clearly in modern times. Democracy is a social function, it’s components include speech, access to information, voting, feasibility of anyone to run for office ect. While money is equal to speech and there are so many secrets or difficult to obtain information any form of democracy will fail. An anarchist society would seek to prevent these sorts of things with a different sort of constitution than we see today. One that protects the influence of every individual instead of special individuals and protects the independance of people in their affairs that are minimally impactful on others.
A caricature of any political system is going to make it seems absurd and unworkable and most societies socialize their populations to have this perspective about any system that is not entirely similar to their own.
Still, the mainly Anarcho-Syndicalist Spanish Revolution was (at least in its intent) a class revolution, with workers seizing control of the factories (for real) and peasants seizing the land and everything.
Some people, sure, but that’s not what’s under discussion here. Ironically, your post itself, by suggesting that is what folks are discussing, is a straw man :).
The basic idea we’re discussing here is that an anarchist society lacks a clear formal hierarchy, and as such has trouble being as organized and efficient at many tasks (including coercive violence) as opposing social groups who have a clear formal hierarchy. It would be absurd, in my opinion, to dispute this, and I’ve known plenty of anarchists who freely admit that this is true; they’re willing to give up efficiency in favor of social justice and liberty. As would I, if I didn’t think that lack of efficiency at coercive violence compared to hierarchical groups were a fatal flaw.
You’ve read the majority of comments in this thread? The OP?
Much of the dispute Anarchism has with other systems is the conjecture that hierarchy is not needed for organization. People can assume roles without assuming dominance. I’m happy to be absurd in any case. Absurdity is usually a social distinction rather than a logical one after all.
I don’t know who these people calling themselves Anarchists are but in most cases more participation creates better efficiency not worse. The more centrally directed an economy is the less efficient it usually is unless you’re the ruler and want the last dodo bird for dinner.
There are the inefficiencies in law enforcement now. People would prefer that drug offenses not be treated like violence or theft and yet they are. We would like to see real rehabilitation instead of places that turn out more virulent criminals. People do not trust the police and do not cooperate with them. The police themselves are unaccountable or much less so for their crimes.
One could also argue that much of US war is a PR campaign ala 1984’s endless war prescription for keeping the domestic population docile and cooperative to the status quo. The modern economic practices that include virtual monopoly/oligopoly (microsoft, apple, cable companies ect), advertising over quality or safety (I’ve heard its over a trillion dollars a year, in relation GDP that doesn’t sound like efficiency to me), the larger a company is the less likely it is to be interfered with by the government or even given tax gifts by it as they are able to manipulate regulators and elected officials, this is the opposite dynamic one would want if you were considering efficiency.
All of these things occur because of the power and unaccountability of hierarchies. No serious Anarchist believes that society would work worse without the hierarchies that prey upon humanity now.
“minimally impactful” IE stay out of my bedroom, my church, my diversionary activities ect but don’t expect society to stay out of your election rigging mountiantop removal mining, manufacturing explosives in a densely populated city ect.
Again, this is something of a straw man. Nobody here has said that hierarchy is needed for organization, nor does the bit that you quote. I suggested that hierarchy leads to more efficiency in organization.
If by “participation” you mean “participation in decision-making,” this is a bizarre stance. There’s a reason why most corporations have a top-down structure, why there’s not some workers-collective auto factory that outcompetes the ones with a strict hierarchy. I’m pro-union, but it’s pretty well established that the advantage of unions is that they make workers’ lives less hellish, not that they result in more efficient processes. There’s a reason why anthills have one queen, why jellyfish haven’t built the Taj Mahal, why there’s a C in every CPU.
“Worse”? I’m not disputing that; I’m suggesting that without those hierarchies, things are less efficient. Which is totally fine, and which even when I was organizing anarchist conferences was something totally obvious to me (and to many anarchists I knew). “No serious anarchist” may be a phrase like “No true Scotsman,” in which case of course it’s undebatable; but if it’s something else, you need to be careful about more straw-manning with substituting “worse” for “less efficient.”
Up to now, I’d say the reason is that the top-down mentality people are the ones with capital, either explicitly or implicitly through its control (e.g. bankers loaning someone else’s money). Since their practices generally ensure this remains so, I think that’s enough of an explanation in itself.
Efficiency is just a measure. Right now, we agree on a particular few kinds of efficiencies as being good enough. I don’t believe anyone has used them to demonstrate that unions are inefficient. (BUT I probably wouldn’t be in a position to know if they did, either.)
Who is in charge, the mitochondria or the cell’s DNA? Also, the queen has no power, she just does her job, same as the other ants. But I don’t know if I should argue these analogies too much. I’ve been thinking about starting a thread on this exact topic.
How about “Don’t hoard food”? Even if it’s food you have because you worked to grow it? Or if you don’t have enough food to keep your family from going hungry, but someone insists that others need it more? How about if your stubborn individualism and self-reliance, and that of like-minded others, is getting in the way of establishing Utopia? Collectivism presumes that ultimately everything impacts others.
Libertarianism takes as a premise that legitimate self-interest done right IS “minimally impactful” of others. But too many people seem to think that any private property or free trade invariably devolves into plutocrats enslaving the masses. This is exactly the counterpart of claiming that Anarchy inevitably devolves into Stalinism. LIbertarians don’t want to see OmniCorp rule the world any more than Anarchists want to see the Politburo rule it.
If you are 100% independent of society without harming society you can do whatever you want with the product of your labor. If you benefit from community industry and resources then hoarding food is you hoarding your production while others do not. Doesn’t sound justified or reasonable to me. A world where food is scarce hasn’t existed in some time, but there is always something each person would want to give to their clan more than to others. Nepotism is the main driver of injustice and hierarchy in the world imo, and with understandable and natural cause. You need mechanisms to prevent the natural tendency for people to help their own at the expense of others. To ask people to do that willingly is just a recipe for failure.
There are plenty of ways that people can be independent outside the spheres of society. Things that occur within the spheres of society are by their nature not individual even if some instincts, culture and learned adaptations make people behave as if they are.
Every society has dissenters, but societies that are democratic tend to treat them well, because the freedom to express your own ideas without reprisal is a powerful ingredient in quality of life and people tend to set things up to enhance their quality of life when they have the choice. The less democracy a society has and the more concentrated power it has is usually a direct relationship to how badly dissenters are treated.
Most political systems proposed claim that they want prosperity and freedom as a result of their recipe. You have to look at the mechanisms they have in their cookbook to really determine what would probably result from their implementation. Unrestricted private power will dominate society given any multi-generational length of time. What is needed is facilitation for control over all political and economic spheres of society by the greatest number of people possible. The idea that the mob will barbarically strip society down to savage levels of existence is a propaganda of the minorities in power throughout history.
So now your anarchist, no-government, coercion-free society has a “mechanism” to get people to abrogate their self-interest in the name of the larger good. See Ayn Rand’s “We The Living”. My point is that we have ample evidence from experience that forced “unselfishness” is as great or greater an evil than “unresticted private power”.
How about no control at all? Isn’t that the literal definition of an-archy? You seem to be defining (see top of post :p) anarchy as “That system that will prevent the reestablishment of privately based oligarchic power”. Again, libertarians don’t want feudalism and they don’t want OmniCorp. They want a non-coercive society.
The looting mob is actually an improvement over the People’s Committe.
Ararchism may not have a definite tradition to specify it’s tenets however you like many in this thread begin by focusing on a very rare and unpopular version which begins and ends it’s understanding with a Webster’s dictionary.
Ararchism is not a literal translation of the root elements of the word anymore than any political philosophy is.
If you would like to excerpt the portions of Ayn Rand’s argument and evidence you’d like me to consider go on ahead. I haven’t looked deeply at her work but from what I have she always struck me as th ultimate narcissist, psychopathic and absurd, useless in any context other than as fodder for performance art, or as an honest expression of viewpoints to be feared by the 99.99%. (The 0.001% are the serial killers).
Here is an excerpt from an article by Chomsky on the issue, you can go through the rest of the article if you like and won’t find much of this “no-government, coercion-free society” stuff you’re referring to unless you quote out of context.
"Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create “free associations of free producers” that would engage in militant struggle and prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis. These associations would serve as "a practical school of anarchism."20 If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon’s often quoted phrase, merely a form of “theft” – "the exploitation of the weak by the strong"21 – control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome.
In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the means of production, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about “the third and last emancipatory phase of history,” the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).22 The imminent danger to “civilization” was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:
As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defended – or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it. but today, when the right of property is regarded as the last undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being political, have become social? Do you not see that, little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them which aim not merely at removing such and such laws, such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the very foundations of society itself?23
The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded
to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor."
I guess you can always just lie face down and not move, and the looting mob might sweep past you without pausing to assault you… The people’s committee will take more effort to search for you to send you to re-education camp or relocate you to a farming commune…
(Also, it’s sometimes easier to join the looting mob than it is to join the people’s committee…)
And yet the people’s committee can base itself on rational principles and seek to build up a working economic system, whereas the looting mob cannot. The people’s committee sometimes produces tractor factories and a space program. The looting mob can never build anything; it can only tear things down.
Damn nasty choice! Let’s try to avoid having to make it!
We The Living is a novel set in the 1920’s Soviet Union based on Rand’s direct observation of what happened there. She doesn’t present an “argument”, she simply relates what happened then, which speaks for itself.
Except that a “free association” that “takes over” the organization of production must inherently become a bureaucracy, which is what this whole thread has been debating.
If that’s the case, then the Soviet Union reversed history, since it turned wage earners into slaves and serfs of the state; they just weren’t privately owned.
Ok, let’s talk a little about property. Let’s start with land, since other than the clothes on your back if anything is “yours” you need a place to keep it: a house with four walls and the land it sits on. I don’t know about you but I like having possessions. I like having four walls around me where I can say “this is my place, this is where I can be alone if I want and no one can come in here without my permission. And all the things in my place are mine, and you can’t just walk off with them”. I can’t imagine any fundamental human privacy or individuality without this.
If I’m to take arguments about abolishing property at face value, then they seem to be saying that this is wrong. That as long as anyone else might decide that they had a better use for it, that it was wrong of me to “expropriate” the land by building a house on it and calling it Mine. That as long as there’s anyone on the face of the Earth who is homeless, that I have no right to deny them shelter. That as long as anyone has unmet needs that I have no right to any surplus beyond a bare physical existence. That the entire mass of humanity, simply by existing, nullifies any rights I have by majority vote. Instead of being a human being I am now one-seven billionth of “humanity”, and have exactly a one-seven billionth share of anything “humanity” might exert a claim to. That my friend is the Collective.
Again you argue by making strange assumptions and imagination of a dystopian nightmare. What people would have dibs on in an Anarchist society would be democratically decided in the first place. I imagine as you seem to that most people would like their own place that they might share with family or friends or themselves only and creature comforts. What my excerpt was talking about in reference to property were the non-human means of production. Materials, technologies, equipment ect. Can you go through life not owning an industrial steel mill? I can.
If only. What actually happens is that since the Revolution has to overthrow the Exploiters, if you vote to retain private property that brands you as one of the bourgeois, and therefore your vote doesn’t count.
BTW, if it sounds like I keep setting up strawmen I’m sorry, but the whole history of Anarchism/Socialism is one long slippery slope of betrayal of ideals. First, Proudhon advocated that something like mass disobedience on the part of the masses could ignore the state out of existence. Then Bakunin declared that since the exploiting class would never go quietly, that an actual revolution was necessary. Bakunin’s insistence that the Revolution had to come spontaneously from the masses was denied by Marx, who claimed that the masses had to be educated and regimented by a revolutionary cadre, who would decide which beliefs fit Socialism and which didn’t. To win the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks had to found the Soviet Union by killing anyone who opposed the Party, and anyone who disagreed with the Party’s political and ideological goals was automatically marginalized. Then, since in a revolutionary nation ideology equals power, factions played holier-than-thou and eliminated their political rivals by having them purged, ending up with Stalin as the Pope of Soviet Communism.
It just doesn’t do any good to say “But that’s not Anarchism” when the whole process has happened once already and no one can offer a plausible mechanism how you could avoid repeating it. Oscar Wilde presciently said that “If governments are to be armed with economic power”, “if in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first”.
