Anarchy is not by nature disorganized. Lack of hierarchy doesn’t mean lack of organization. Probably a well-functioning anarchist organization is better organized than most hierarchical ones.
If friends are not there to defend the group of three, mutual aid is missing. That’s why it failed.
Actually, there seems to be a bit of a mix-up. Let me clarify.
In an anarchist group, enforcing anything goes against its fundamental principles.
If personal gain is the motive, one isn’t truly aligned with the group’s social contract and isn’t considered part of it.
Decisions are made collectively, without hierarchy. Voting or delegating organisational tasks to sub-groups is the norm.
I won’t go into words like “attacking,” “defense,” or “threats” as they are military terms, far from the anarchist ethos.
And I won’t call you “bro” or make you read theory. I feel you won’t.
Anarchism is really against coercion, that’s what is meant by hierarchy. Hierarchy only makes sense if it’s used for coercion of other’s behavior.
There is no reason a group of people can’t organize in a voluntary hierarchy to complete a task without the use of coercion.
Imagine a group of 10 anarchist making pizza for the homeless. Two of them make pizza for a living and 8 are there for the week to help out. There is nothing preventing those 8 people from taking instruction from the two that know how to make pizza. Nobody is coerced to be there or to do anything.
We don’t need to incentivse not selling people out. Heirarchy creates a set of incentives TO sell people out. Remove those incentives and people will for the most part not sell people out. You’ve got it exactly backwards.
Ask your buddy mao about anarchist fighting forces. He literally took anarchist tactics around decentralized militias and used them to great success. The Vietnamese as well. Or have a look at the Spanish revolution, rojava, the Ukrainian black army, or the zapatistas if you need more proof that decentralized militant forces are effective and capable. It doesn’t warrant an in detail explanation because “but how fight if democracy???” is weak as fuck.
What does a well-functioning anarchist organization look like, though? How does one of any size prevent from fracturing into competing factions over time? If such organizations are limited to tight-knit community scales, I can’t see how it’s not eventual feudalism with extra steps.
Hierarchy isn’t the opposite of anarchy.
It’s just a type of rule. As in “an-archy”, without ruler.
There’s also “synarchy”, meaning “joint rule or government by two or more individuals or parties”, which I feel is far more what people here are advocating in the name of anarchism.
Who said anarchists and their friends will not defend from outside threats? The Spanish anarchists organized and fought for 3 years against overwhelming odds when they had to.
Remains to be seen if anarchism can ever win though.
Statist forces have always triumphed.
Monarchy always triumphed over democracy until it didn’t. Slavery always triumphed over abolition until it didn’t.
Every empire’s days are numbered, it’s not like anything is destined to be forever. I wonder how many days are left for the Zapatistas?
Yeah , but …
In Paris we fought and were massacred.
In Korea/Manchuria we fought and were massacred.
In Ukraine we fought and were massacred.
And as you say in Spain we fought, but then we were massacred.
There’s more of course, but you get the idea.
Something probably should be done differently in the future.
So? How many slave revolutions did we have before it was “technically” abolished (it’s still ongoing, but at least illegal in principle)? We had legal slavery for like ~6K years until it was abolished. Capitalism only exists for ~400 years and there were hundreds of failed democratic revolutions. Anarchism as a movement is barely over 150yo and no anarchist revolution happened before 100 years. Just because things don’t happen overnight, or even in our lifetime, doesn’t mean they’re impossible.
Also notably, the Kronstadt anarchists held a general assembly to dicsuss the question of “shall we accept Lenin’s ultimatum, or fight a battle against the Red Army?” and decided democratically to fight.
(The battle was extremely bloody, anarchists lost and the Red Army won, at the cost of losing at least 5 times more people. Considerable numbers of anarchists escaped to Finland.)
In short: anarchists can use heavy artillery when needed, even if they know that war is not healthy - neither for them or the society they want.
mutual aid, equality or freedom are not doomed to fail: as long as human beings live in societies they will seek cooperation and justice.
Perhaps like… organised cooperation, even perhaps putting things on paper to make sure what has been agreed upon gets followed through. Maybe even assign some people to do that for the larger society, so everyone doest have to worry about it. I mean, everyone should help each other, so if someone just doesn’t anyone on purpose and even takes other’s things, they should face some sort of negative consequence, but then we’d need to assign people who verify that someone has broken the rules and some to enforce that the negative consequences actually happen.
And wow, the anarcho-syndicalist commune now has government, taxes, justice and law enforcement.
People are by nature cooperative unless fucked over, but I find it weird that the prescriptive meaning of “anarchy” is completely glossed over.
The type of society I want to live in definitely won’t happen without any sort of rules or regulations about at least some things. Otherwise we won’t have industry, and I like my toys. We can’t manage a good (and advanced) society without good regulation which requires good government.
Otherwise we won’t have industry, and I like my toys.
Your toys are being manufactured by some underpaid slave worker in china or india. Have fun playing with these in the few hours of life you got left from the industry.
as long as human beings live in societies they will seek cooperation and justice.
You defeated your own position. Humans aren’t, nor can be perfecly just nor perfectly cooperative.
You defeat your own position, no one said perfection was necessary to achieve any kind of society, no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough and functional.
You have a very skewed idea of anarchism. I won’t deny the existence of anti-organizational and pacifist anarchist groups but they’re not a majority. Social anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, communalism, Marxist autonomism, council communism, neozapatismo, and especifism are all libertarian socialist ideologies that espouse the necessity of organization and self defense. I’m sure I’m missing a few too. You’re taking a silly comic as serious commentary on the ideological substance of a deep and diverse body of political theory.
Do you wait your turn in line at the store under the threat of violence? Do you only drive the speed limit because if you didn’t you would get pulled over and have your license suspended? Do you give money/food to the homeless despite it being againstl local bylaws that could land you with a fine?
Enforcement in day to day life is an illusion. People don’t need to be forced to “behave”. By and large, most of us just do because we want to get on with our day. If there is no social incentive to harm others, for the most part people.wont harm others because we simply have no desire to harm others. There are ways to account for fringe cases that don’t require a hierarchical, domineering system
Anarchism is neither inherently pacifist nor disorganized, that’s your lack of understanding showing.
The circle A anarchism logo means “order without hierarchy”.
You speak as if we’re in a functional system where people are safe, getting here was smooth sailing, and I’m proposing a preposterous idea. Our system currently does not work and billions have died to get to this fucked up place. Why would you think a different system will fail because it is not like just the current failing system?
If I see a guy shoplifting and just shoot him, who is in a position to tell me that I was wrong
The community, a functional anarchist community wouldn’t tolerate this, it would become a crime in itself. A functional anarchist community would defend itself and have members ready to do so. If somebody shot another person for something like shoplifting (which wouldn’t be a thing in anarchism duh) that would be murder and that person would now be at risk of termination as a mortal threat to the community. People don’t usually desire to escalate things though, so contrived examples like this are silly.
You can’t have some lackadaisical ad hoc minute men arrangement, there are too many humans and too many competing interests for that to work in the modern world.
I’m not one of those that thinks anarchism is a drop-in replacement for capitalism or that anarchism can come from violent revolution. If anything close to anarchism could ever happen it would take at least a couple generations (of cultural change) and co-occur with degrowth. We know that our current system is unsustainable, so we’re either going to end up with something like anarcho-communism + degrowth or we won’t exist anymore. There is no way a hierarchical system that exploits that planet to support billions will be able to exist beyond the next decades, can’t happen. Even socialism just makes things more equal while we destroy the planet.
I’ve never once met an anarchist who can coherently explain how, in a practical sense, you ensure justice and order at a large scale without a state, legal framework
The scale and ways of life now are the result of an exploitative economic system. Without that it’s not our nature to form into efficiently exploitable structures. We’d form into manageable communities as humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the appearance of the state.
Who makes sure my lights stay on and that my landlord didn’t use asbestos and lead pipes when…
You and your community work to keep the lights on and other needs met. For asbestos and lead pipes, the motivations to do these things come from an exploitative economic system. In anarchism, if someone sells you poison, you can defend yourself. There won’t be many people selling lead pipes when their life is on the line rather than a fine or job loss.
You can’t just have mob justice or random individuals deciding based on their own arbitrary, subjective opinion how to carry out justice at any given
So instead we should have the opinion of the rich powerful racist people enforced by people with a license to kill and who use in inordinately more often on vulnerable populations who cannot legally protect themselves?
Does that person’s wife or brother now get to shoot me?
Yes, and the community might say, “well, he deserved it, have a taco”. Our current system basically allows most men to rape women and the woman has no recourse because the state protects the rapist. This is not a working system.
