Real question: what do anarchists expect society to do/become and why is it better?
Nuanced answers only
So if you ask a group of 5 leftists of any sort how they imagine society might be structured you’ll get 6 answers. Anarchists are no different, it’s difficult because it’s off the map yeah?
The common thread is a society with no involuntary impositions of power and authority. That isn’t no rules, many societies in the past and present have varying degrees of hierarchy and even within the same society the degree of hierarchy can change depending on what groups of people are doing.
you know how when you organise a family gathering nobody is “in charge” exactly? people select tasks they are suited to or feel it’s their turn to do and go about doing them. People might choose to defer decisions to another person but always retain the ability to withdraw that consent and so on?
Anarchists imagine a society more like that, where when a person wants something done they assemble a group of people, communicate their ideas, reach a consensus on whether it should or shouldn’t be done, if people agree then they organise themselves into a group to accomplish the task.
It’s really not so different from how you probably conduct yourself most of the time. It’s actually kinda rare for people to use coercive violence to get people to cooperate. Anarchists think we can all just take a few more steps towards being anarchists all the time.
As to why would it be better? well what feels better: cooking at a community gathering or working at a restaurant with your boss breathing down your neck?
This sounds a whole lot like the indigenous peoples of various lands until the imperial machines of war rolled them over. These days, I don’t think you need a military budget rivaling America’s, but I think some form of military defensive structures would need to remain in place to protect your massive hippie nation-state from opportunistic neighbors.
Ultimately this is the core problem as I see it - a hierarchical society will always be militarily stronger, practically by definition - and if history has taught us anything, it’s that weak neighbors get eaten by their stronger neighbors.
Additionally I think most of these idealized community structures are overly optimistic about the likelihood of a charismatic leader coming along and getting people to follow them, and then not letting them withdraw that power. Anarchists talk about hierarchies without formal power structures, but what is actually stopping someone whose already effectively in charge from turning that power into something more permanent, especially if they’ve convinced the populace that they want that?
Its happened an endless amount of times all throughout history, and I really don’t see why it wouldn’t here. Ultimately it just seems like a fragile system that relies mostly on every single individual being perfectly rational and immune to the draw of populist leaders. Aka - completely unlike actual humans
oh yes, defensive militias are necessary. Communities need to be able to protect themselves.
Fortunately if we’ve learned one thing recently it’s that modern nation states are extremely bad at fighting decentralised resistance. So you don’t necessary need a giant mechanised army in order to be enough of a pain to make invading you infeasible.
The problem with this isn’t military, it’s that it doesn’t work at scale. Even within a family unit it’s hard enough getting six people to agree on anything, and that’s when two of them hold power over the other four.
Of those tribes you mentioned that work how you describe, how many had more than, oh, 50 members?
No involuntary impositions of power and authority is the centrist position. The anarchist position should be no impositions of power and authority even if they are voluntary. A perfect example of voluntary power and authority is wage labor. By any usable standard, wage labor is voluntary. Anarchists should object to wage labor because it involves a hierarchy of alienation. This violates workers’ inalienable rights, which are rights that can’t be given up even with consent
When somebody asks for an intro to anarchism I generally don’t feel it’s super useful to get deep into the weeds of definitions.
The salient point is no “I’m your boss do what I say or you starve” maybe “You asked me to teach you, practice these tasks or find another teacher”
What if I’m really into impositions of power and authority though? Like REALLY into it??
So, honest question, genuinely not here to argue but to learn: how is this approach scalable to a society of millions, or even billions? What are some thoughts on this?
It seems to me that any society in history that operates this way successfully consists of small groups of people living very differently than we generally do today, often sharing a common ethnic or familial bond or some common purpose. Although I’m sympathetic to anarchism in principle and in smaller groups, human society seems to have gone beyond any hope of a successful anarchic turnover long ago. Any breakdown of societal order seems to result in bad actors taking advantage, even when such developments seem positive at first. And any positive ahierarchical community that becomes too big eventually becomes corrupted it seems.
There are examples of libeterian socialist societies today (chiapas, rojava) and historically (spain, ukraine etc.). What’s common with both is that they have to put up with relentless attacks from capitalists and fascists. Yet despite that they, in the case of rojava and chiapas, have prevailed.
If you think anarchism can only work in small communities then there are anarchist theories focusing on smaller communities, like Bookchin.
Revolution also isn’t something that happens in a day and suddenly you have to re-strucure all of society. During and before the revolution you are already creating these anarchist structures so when you get to that point you are prepared. Working with mutual aid for example doesn’t just help people now but train ourselves to live a different life based on solidarity. I believe that even if anarchism will never happen it still worth pursuing these different forms of organisation. This is partly because I am fairly confident capitalism, at least globally, will collapse. Climate change among other things will see to that. What will come after might truly be horrific but I believe anarchism is going to be the only real alternative to it if we want to live truly free.
This is sort of way too big for a lemmy comment haha.
I think if you’re interested then it’s the sort of thing maybe best learned from books directly. Anything I try and write will be an extremely crude summary pre mangled through my own imperfect understanding.
You could read about what the CNT/FAI did to manage a war economy, they learned on the fly pretty quick. Conquest of bread is good to lay out the sort of fundamentals. Murry Bookchin’s works are pretty influential. Other’s probs have other suggestions.
You read Ian M Banks Culture series? The organization of the culture there seems pretty similar. (Though far future)
This seems very naive and superficial, which is, as far as I know, what other philosophers criticise about anarchism.
a group of people, communicate their ideas, reach a consensus on whether it should or shouldn’t be done, if people agree then they organise themselves into a group to accomplish the task
That’s exactly how the state as a concept came into existence. How are we not currently living in the consequence of what people reached out of anarchy? It seems like we are already living what anarchists suppose will happen in an anarchist society.
It’s actually kinda rare for people to use coercive violence to get people to cooperate.
looks at human history What?
cooking at a community gathering or working at a restaurant
What does that have to do with anarchism?
I’m super exhausted but you’re wrong about the state. The modern nation state comes out of the directorate post French revolution, and the proto state going back to like Ur and other early cities in Mesopotamia was based off slave taking by warriors primarily, enabled by appropriation of grain. Anthropologist James C Scott writes about this a fair bit, he’s notably not an anarchist btw if that affects assessment of bias.
re coercive violence: I mean it in the sense that it is something individuals don’t spend much time doing. Obviously when you look at millions of people over decades it happens but it is much much less common than consensus seeking. Think of the ?millions? of interactions people have and how few involve violence or the threat thereof.
Most people have a very flaws understanding of anarchism. It absolutely is NOT a society without rules, that’s chaos and where the most physically powerful will rule, which is objectively a terrible thing and a big step backwards.
Anarchism is not really a system of government, but the philosophical belief that there should not be a heiarchy in societal laws. It can be applied in many different forms of goverment, most commonly with democracy but there are plenty of anarcho-communist out there. The gist is that systems that promote one group being shown favor, especially at the expense of another, should be dismantled. And what replaces it should be set up to serve and protect all people evenly.
This usually means police abolition and refocusing that energy on the underlining reasons people break “the law”. Like providing a minimum level of housing, income and food to all.
I can’t summerize the books succiently, but if you are interested The Dispossed and The Conquest of Bread deals with more examples.
Just echoing Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is an fantastic read. It does a great job of contrasting anarchism with hierarchical societies without really playing favorites.
Her entire body of work is just fantastic, honestly my favorite author. I just finished The Lathe of Heaven the other day and really appreciate her sociological approach to sci-fi.
This usually means police abolition and refocusing that energy on the underlining reasons people break “the law”. Like providing a minimum level of housing, income and food to all.
Do these people really believe only homeless and poor people are hurting other people?
Of course no one believes that, don’t make hyperbolic strawmen. But you can’t deny that poverty definitely drives a nontrivial percentage of crimes, and we have plenty enough resources to end poverty. Let’s do that, and the remaining actual sociopaths can stay in prison for life. (But also let’s make prison no longer a place where we torture and enslave people.)
The gist is that systems that promote one group being shown favor,
Why not just fix the system?
What’s to stop larger groups acting in their own interest under anarchy? What would stop them?
Governance is making hard decisions and compromises, not giving everyone everything they want all the time.
When compromises eventually arise, and there’s 70% blue team and 30% red team, why wouldn’t blue team dominate?
You can’t “fix,” say, Capitalism into not having a power dynamic of class-based society, only band-aid fixes. This isn’t exclusive to Anarchism, all forms of radicalism cannot be meaningfully implemented into existing Neoliberal Democracy.
Why do you imagine groups would need to go against the rest of society in order to gain, rather than work cooperatively? How would they go against the consensus?
Why do you believe hard decisions cannot be achieved without centralism?
Why do you think Anarchists are proposing mob rule, which is a centralized position, rather than a form such as Participatory Economics?
Much of your questions are based on preconceived notions of Leftism and Anarchism that are better answered in longer, more dedicated sources than a lemmy post comment section.
Looking at the replies it seems anarchism is about having strong yet diverging opinions on the definition of anarchism
Ooh, just like libertarianism!
(Don’t tell the anarchists I made that comparison)
Libertarianism original referd to anarchism actually. The modern usage of ultra-capitalist nonsense comes from people intentionally redefining the word cause they were mad that Liberalism no longer referd to what they were doing
That’s just the general leftist experience. From Marxist-Leninists to Orthodox Marxists to Anarcho-Communists to Anarcho-Syndicalists to Democratic Socialists to Left Communists (ICP flavor) to Left Communists (Dutch/German flavor) to Libertarian Socialists to Market Socialists to Marxist-Leninist-Maoists to Dengists to Council Communists to everything in between, each seemingly hates the guts of the others.
Ask any one from each of these and they will all have a general “worker ownership of the Means of Production is good” base, with about a million different takes on what that actually means and what that actually looks like.
In general, I think it’s safe to say that democracy is a good thing, decentralization helps protect against Authoritarianism, and moving towards a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society is a good thing. Until then, people should learn and improve their understanding as much as possible, teach others, organize local communities and unions, and work on self-improvement.
I don’t actually know all that much about it, but the anarchists that I know are all about communities and mutual support and stuff. So I guess they think government is bad and communities supporting each other is good.
Personally I wonder what they’d call it when a community gets really good at providing a particular type of support and they agree to pool their resources to efficiently provide said support to all members of the community.
Yes yes and then they discover that managing that shared pool of resources is quite the job so they all decide on a few key people to take on the task with specific roles. I think we’re going somewhere with this!
But nobody is appointed any role for life or until a higher boss says so, this is the key difference. Also the decisions on that role are not done in a vacuum, they can’t give orders and expect anyone to blindly follow it and never question. They have to be aligned with what the community wants, and if the person doesn’t act accordingly anyone can step in.
managing that shared pool of resources is quite the job
No, it really isn’t… people have done that for millenia.
Different
Some people are so negatively affected by society and its structures, literally anything would be better.
See: Brodie in Dogma.
Most people talking about anarchy just want to f*** some s*** up because they feel powerless or threatened or boxed in. But that’s not what anarchy is or how it functions as a community structure.
A good way to think about anarchism as an actual community structure, as a commune, is to think about the native Americans pre colonization.
Anarchism is not the absence of societal or authority structures, it’s freedom to create your own rules within your community and exist separately from other communities.
So each native American tribe had their own rules and their own territory and within that territory their rules were absolute, but 20 mi over other tribe had their own rules and territory and their rules were absolute.
It’s actually pretty similar to the idea of having separate states that get to make their own laws in the United States(guns and prostitutes are fine in one state but get you years of prison in another), except that anarchy has only worked in small groups because unless you have strict rules within each community, one bad actor can spoil an entire community of 200 people.
So after your tribe grows too large(a state) it’s unsustainable without smaller communities(towns) within your tribe using bureaucracy/authority to keep people in line.
So after your tribe grows too large(a state) it’s unsustainable
This is just a baseless trope with zero evidence to back it up - there is no theoretical upper limit on horizontal organizing. None.
What is a baseless trope? It doesn’t sound like you’re using “trope” correctly.
There’s no theoretical upper limit to many concepts, rendering that comment irrelevant, but anarchism historically has a practical upper limit on group size and proximity. You can’t indefinitely grow your population without taking logistics and territory into account, and the lack of centralized resource management necessitates territorial expansion.
It sounds like maybe you have a question. You can ask that question.
It’s better because it’s a society based on mutual aid instead of exploitation. There are different theories about how exactly it will look like or how you get there. But overall most agree that it’s a non-hierarchical society, based on self-management and federalism. Decisions are made through direct democracy. If you want to read more there is a good chapter about it here Final Objectives: Social Revolution and Libertarian Socialism.
Well, that’s the whole point of anarchism, really… dismantling the power structures that is enabling all the exploitation in the first place.
By removing the legal means that enable exploiters, e.g. private proterty.
I can tell you Anarchism is misunderstood. Sure, there are some utopians, but every political ideology has them. Personally, I believe syndicalism is the way to go, that’s why I’m in the IWW. A federation of industrial unions with a focus on creating a culture of care and personal autonomy in the small scale could work. Sure, right now there’s a lot of work needing to be done, but what can you expect after decades of repression?
I think some anarchists are just angry. But “anarchy” as a type of government, means a society without leaders. (Anarchos means “without kings”) just people living peacefully, helping each other, without anyone really needing to be in charge.
For more info read V for Vendetta. The movie didn’t really cover this well, but the book makes it feel like the next stage of human evolution.
means a society without leaders.
You are correct… the word anarchos means “without kings.” Kings aren’t leaders, though… they are cogs of institutionalized power, just like CEOs and prime ministers. Nobody chooses to follow them - people are coerced into doing so through force.
So no… anarchists have no problems with actual leaders - they have plenty of examples of anarchist leaders themselves, Nestor Makhno just being one.
arent leaders necessary to organize everyone though? things like traffic for example flow better when they are lead by a central authority commanding the stoplights.
it doesnt even necessarily mean it has to be coercitive, i imagine most people agree with this particular example.
These structures can still exist in an anarchist society. The difference is the way decisions are made.
Hierarchical: top down Anarchist: bottom up
So the people choose to delegate the task of e.g. making sure the traffic flows properly to a group of people who carry out the will of the collective.
Currently, these people are chosen by heads of states, ministers, or some other level counted from the top.
Useful, but not necessary. There are measures that can reasonably overcome the simpler answer of centralization.
Anarchism isn’t simplicity, it’s deceptively complex.
They don’t really expect society. Society relies on rules and common understanding, actual anarchy would lack society.
Anarchy is order. Rules and comon understandings are kinda central to anarchist theory. Anarchy is a common understanding.
It’s also impossible. All you need to overthrow the whole system is a small group of dissidents.
Why would you need hierarchical command and controleformalized power structures (the thing anarchist oppose) for society?
Rules and common understanding naturally emerge when humans live together. You don’t need a king/chief/boss/god for that.
the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
You aren’t anarchistic if you’re organized, that’s kind of the point.
That’s not an argument that’s a poorly disguised insult to wit, get fucked bud make an argument or stay quiet.
Also mad max had communism and thus society, shitty society but still.
From a most basic standpoint, nothing besides awareness, because the way i see it the world is and has always been Anarchy. We can make as many complex laws, rules and regulations as we want but the fact is that people can choose to break them. The reality of crime is proof that in the end personal decisions will always be a higher form of authority. We are mostly ok because most people choose to follow laws and there is more good in people and bad.
The difference is that right now we seem to live in a world where people really believe that they are born as subjects to serve. the notion to “earn a living” is a clear example. No one is born by choice, we where given a body and a mind just like any other species and we did what we needed to to grow up and survive in the socio-geological location we happened to be in.
