I’m politically agnostic and have moved from a slightly conservative stance to a vastly more progressive stance (european). i still dont get the more niche things like tankies and anarchists at this point but I would like to, without spending 10 hours reading endless manifests (which do have merit, no doubt, but still).
Can someone explain to me why anarchy isnt the guy (or gal, or gang, or entity) with the bigger stick making the rules?
Anarchism understood as a proper model and not just “chaos” is about horizontal and distributed power structures.
The whole idea is that no single person or group has a monopoly on power. Now if you are asking how do anarchist societies prevent people or groups like that from rising up and forming monopolies of power, there are a bunch of different answers. Ultimately it’s about collective action and proper structure.
If your organization’s rules allow for a single person to rise up and take over, it isn’t formed correctly. It’s like the Fediverse, no one server or person gets to make the rules for all the other servers or developers.
Everything is federated by the choice of the instances and ultimately the users. If they don’t agree with how any instance is being run, they can start their own and run it how they want, federating with who they want assuming it is mutual.
Anybody can fork the project at any time, build it different, start a new instance, run it how they want, etc.
You build into your society, mechanisms that resist monopolies of power. It’s like how your body’s immune system has layers of protection against all kinds of germs.
Another example, in typical small company the structure is top-down with the owner usually being a single person with universal power over all their employees. They can hire and fire whoever they want whenever they want. They can shut down the company or change how any part of it operates whenever they want. Nothing in that company structure protects the employees from abuse by the owner.
There is no magic bullet to protect against everything, just like how your body despite being healthy and strong can still succumb to cancer, infection, poison, etc. That isn’t a reason to just give up on being fit and healthy, because it is about improving your odds and trying to make your life on the average better.
I was going to engage in some debate with this, but after your last paragraph I no longer find it necessary.
It illustrates one of the nastier, but also more important of life lessons. No system or even choice is going to be without its own flaws and vulnerabilities, they’ll just be different ones from system to system. So, it’s less about any one system being “right”, or even just “better”, but instead “appropriate to the circumstances/environment/goals”.
Once you acknowledge this, it becomes a lot harder to passionately defend any particular system, because you’re no longer as eager to ignore its own unique vulnerabilities. I believe deeply in democracy and freedom of information for instance, but I cannot bring myself to ignore that it creates a vulnerability for us that someone like Xi Jinping, with his powerful control over the local information space, simply does not experience.
Authoritarian systems, on the other hand, have to deal with the very basic fact that there is nothing divine or magical about that man on top, he’s as human as the rest of us. So, if you get rid of him, you may be able to take and keep his job. Where in a democracy you’d just have to face re-election within a few years.
Pros and cons, always, with pretty much everything. Then the next most important consideration imo is simply scale. Some systems work very well within very small scales, say, a small family. But when scaling these systems up, it can change the circumstances enough that their value changes.
To illustrate this I always like to use littering a banana peel. If just one person litters a banana peel, it is largely harmless. If, however, a million people litter banana peels all in one spot, you can actually create a potential problem where one did not exist before. Scaling the behavior up changes how we need to think about it. This has a lot of ramifications for business in the modern world, where scale is usually desirable. Also feeds into many civil engineering problems.
I think it is important to add that even though no system is perfect and every system has it’s pros and cons, that doesn’t make them equal. As soon as we define goals, for example equal rights, some systems will be better equipped at achieving those while others might be actively hostile to them.
I don’t think you’re saying anything contrary but I wanted to make one point clear.
The democracy we live under is not unique to capitalism. In fact, our current system has less democracy than an anarchist system would. Also capitalism doesn’t have any requirement to be democratic. Whereas with anarchism, any dictatorship is directly against the core tenets of the system.
That being said, (I have not read enough theory to know for sure but) anarchism doesn’t necessarily preclude the idea of having managers or even CEO’s. It does preclude those positions having total power and control of an enterprise though. Dismantling the hierarchical structure of modern society doesn’t mean having someone be a coordinator of a larger group isn’t helpful. It just means that job isn’t given greater power or more significance than those being coordinated. Our current idea of a CEO is very dictatorial, but that’s not how it has to be.
Exactly. Syndicalism is an anarchist model and in it the union that owns the means of production may decide to have a leadership structure, but that leadership structure has to answer not just to their boss, but also to the collective. The union president might be heavily involved with the company president trying to ensure that the venture is working effectively and planning ahead while also doing right by its workers’ desires. The union leadership would likely be elected and able to either fire or call for the firing of the business leadership.
Oh, I never thought of the Fediverse being anarchic (anarchistic?), that’s a nice thought (then again servers are mostly structured hierarchical with admins and mods and users?).
I’m not sure how well it translates into societies, though. I love the principles of anarchy, I strongly believe that there should be no one ruling over or deciding for other people but I’m not sure this would work in reality since I can just see how the people with the “big stick” (armies) would just invade us while we’re endlessly debating what the best course of action is. I know this is a bleak outlook on the world but you can kind of see it happening now where Russia can just count on Europe and the US arguing among themselves (in their respective systems) while the dictatorship is just fucking shit up. I sure hope I’m proven wrong!
bear in mind here that i’m very much not well-versed in anarchist philosophy, but
servers are mostly structured hierarchical with admins and mods and users
i think even in systems like direct democracy (afaik a kind of anarchy because people directly vote on everything?) it doesn’t really scale and you end up needing to elect someone to make implementation decisions toward the overall goals of the society
the key is that it should be very easy to replace that person, and they should have no real “power” other than things that people would mostly come to the same conclusions about anyway - they’re an administrator, a knowledge worker, and their job is procedural
in the fediverse, we join servers whereby we agree to their rules. moderators and admins are a procedural role that is about interpreting and implementing those rules. we can replace them at any time by changing servers and our loss is minimal - less so on mastodon because of the account transfer feature! thus their power over us is always an individual choice and not something that is forced upon us either explicitly or implicitly
It’s not a perfect model, but it’s decently close. If Lemmy had a way to distribute server ownership to a group of individuals, that would be even closer.
If I was a whiz at developing, I would love to build that kind of feature.
I understand your concern of external threats to an anarchistic society, but I would just remind you that plenty of centralized governments/societies have also been conquered by other centralized powers. Being centralized by no means protects you from that threat. I think the more relevant factor is just overall size of the opposing force.
It doesn’t matter how weak hamsters are compared to you. If enough of them attack you endlessly, eventually you will succumb, if for no other reason than pure exhaustion lol.
However, there are clear examples IRL of far smaller and weaker decentralized forces successfully resisting a much more powerful centralized force. The VietCong vs the USA in Vietnam, the Mujahideen vs the USSR in Afghanistan, the American Revolutionary forces vs England, the French Resistance vs the Nazis, etc.
I would highly recommend the YouTuber, Anark. He has fantastic content discussing all aspects of anarchism, including defense. He also has links to many other great resources to learn about Anarchism.
thank you for explaining. This makes it a lot easier to grasp.
Do you have a source that slowly zooms in on the topic so I can read stuff that helps me get an idea of more concepts regarding this?
There’s a lot of classic books on anarchy. I think Peter Kropotato[sic] has a lot of stuff written before the Russian revolution that goes heavily into why capitalism and feudalism both suck.
I’d like to thank you for taking your time to provide such a thorough answer
Because no one knows anything whatsoever about actual anarchist political theory.
Largely due to it being heavily suppressed and propagandized against by States, capitalist or ‘Communist’, and their adherents.
Anarchy as thought of by the wide and vast majority of people is simply a state of chaos and violence with no clear rulers.
What Anarchy actually is is fairly simple.
Root words derive from Greek.
An- Prefix: Without
Archon: Tyrant/Cruel and Ruthless Ruler/Undefiable Authority
Non insane Anarchists are always critics of the state, corporate structures of organizing the work place, most forms of organized religion, oppressive social norms and anything that creates and maintains any kind of hierarchy in society that results in oppression, impoverishment or cruelty to any particular group of people for illegitimate reasons.
Anarchy is essentially very similar in many ways to communism as Marx envisioned it, in that it is an idealized, as yet not perfectly defined goal of a just, egalitarian and democratic society that heavily emphasizes people being adequately represented economically in their daily lives as workers, as opposed to the standard liberal capitalist model where your boss essentially has authoritarian power over you in the workplace.
Both Marxism and Anarchism are highly critical of the profit motive and the ability of a very small number of people to own all or much of the capital (means of production such as factories) of a society, for very lengthy and detailed reasons.
A very common misunderstanding is what is truly meant by ‘private property’: most people unfamiliar with Marxism or Anarchism believe that Marxists and Anarchists believe that no one should be allowed to singly, individually own /anything/.
This is false. While many different adherents have different precise definitions, generally speaking private possessions are just fine until they get to the point of owning something directly and singly that has a massive impact on the lives of others should you choose to unilateraly use your ‘property rights’ in a way that is beneficial to you personally, but harmful to a large number of other people.
Further, Marxists and Anarchists both generally agree that ‘property rights’ as we currently conceive of them really only functionally exist for the rich and powerful, and are enforced via the power of the state.
Anarchism significantly differs from many later Marxist derived theories such as Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism that generally emphasize that in order to actually achieve an ideal, non capitalist society, one must create a massive state structure (or subvert an existing one) and place all power to reorganize a capitalist economy into a class of totalitarian economic organizers and planners, and that during this process the state is entirely justified in basically any means of crushing dissent it deems necessary.
This is of course heinous to Anarchists, who view a totalitarian state as essentially criminal.
What modern Anarchists, who are, again, not insane, usually support are working both within and outside of existing norms and government structures to meaningfully improve peoples lives amd expand their rights:
Mutual Aid: Direct Involvement in you local community to feed the hungry, house the unhoused, provide aid to the sick and displaced.
Advocacy: Doing what you can to promote ideas and views that will be beneficial to the masses, or to protect at risk minorities, both within existing formal societal structures like governments and businesses, and also within society generally.
Many modern Anarchists are also very concerned about the power if states and corporations to abuse the environment and curtail freedom of expression.
Anarchy also has another useful definition in the context of a world of nation-states:
Anarchy is that same common understanding of a world without rules and chaos, but the realization that this simply describes our current world given the history of actions of and between nation states, who often engage in many harmful acts against other nation-states and their populations, and rarely actually follow any rules or norms which are supposed, but i actuality rarely do, govern affairs between states. States will often do whatever they believe they can get away with that will benefit themselves, even if it means massively harming another state or group of people.
Finally, if you want to also be a modern technologically savvy anarchist, aka a cyberpunk, you can realize that the advent of computer and digital technology means there no longer exist any actually valid reasons, in very many cases, to actually pay for software, and that you should be an advocate of open source software.
So, in summary, Anarchy is not a state of chaos, without rules.
It is a very complex and nuanced political theory of advocacy for a more equitable and more just society.
No serious Anarchist believes that the world would be better if everyone was free to rum around and do literally whatever they want on an individual scale.
What exact kind of society do they propose?
Well unfortunately that differs wildly from Anarchist to Anarchist, but again, as with how Marxist socialism is but a /process/ of transforming from a capitalist society into an as of yet not perfectly defined communism, Anarchism is a /process/ and /method of analysis/ of how to transform into a better society for everyone.
Nice explanation! Thank you. I’m kind of getting the hang of it now. Very glad I asked.
Well, crud. I guess I am much more on the side of anarchists than I thought…
A lot of people are. We have bad press, partly our fault and partly because we’re dangerous to systems of power and those who benefit from them. The cultural idea of power doesn’t mind if everyone swaps places or if things get turned upside down. The framework of thinking persists, everyone in the system understands it. It’s easy. Destroying it though, that means basically everyone has to unlearn a lot. It demands we see the beggar and the ceo as equals influenced by their situation and circumstances.
But also I think one thing to understand that a lot of people don’t is that there’s folks I’d call optimist anarchists, and folks I’d call pessimist anarchists. Optimist anarchists believe that we as people can build a better world together because people tend to want to help people and abolishing hierarchy is the best way to enable that. Pessimist anarchists believe that power tends to fuck with your head and make you a worse person. To them abolishing hierarchy may not result in a good situation, but rather that allowing hierarchy is too high risk. The optimist may say that a benevolent dictator isn’t as good for society as a benevolent society of equals. The pessimist would say that a benevolent dictator is rare at best and highly unlikely to keep happening.
See, unlike the communist tankies who would at this moment chant ‘one of us, one of us’…
I will encourage you to aim to to good in an imperfect world where circumstances are often either morally gray, or involve complex factors that are non obvious, but very relevant and important, to learn moral and ethical theories and challenge yourself to actually answer ‘What is good?’.
I will encourage you to /never/ believe you have all the answers to everything, that there is always more than can be learned, and that there are very rarely one size fits all answers to unique and specific situations, and to know that admitting a mistake or error, and reflecting on why or how you came to be in error, is not the sign of a fool, but is the sign of a genuine person striving to be consistent froma starting point of incomplete knowledge and experience.
I will encourage you to challenge your own assumptions, but to be confident when confronted with rhetoric and theories that you yourself can prove are misleading, logically invalid, or outright justify atrocities.
As can probably be reasonably expected, there is an extremely wide range of Anarchist stances on basically the minutia of theory, as well as on what are and are not defensible or moral stances on specific current events or situations, and there are many Anarchist theoreticians who come from many different cultures and backgrounds, and many who focus much more on how Anarchist theory can or should apply to more specific features of our largely capitalist world.
I have tried here to outline the most broadly agreed upon ideas that… well again probably only really Communist Tankies would find fault with, they kind of have a whole history of incorporating anarchists into initial Social Revolutions, and then murdering them all after they have control of their newly acquired state.
They really do not like that Anarchists existed and still exist, they are very convinced, ironically, that they own the ideology that evolved out of Marx, when in truth prominent Anarchists such as Kropotkin and others actually both agreed and disagreed with each other on various issues, and helped form some of both of their views both by antagonism and agreement.
Anyway, entirely unironically:
Live Long and Prosper, and, the Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few.
People tend to think of anarchism as a power vacuum. As soon as a charismatic person comes in they’ll start gaining more and more following. But that’s not really how it works. Anarchy is about filling that vacuum with everyone. If a decision needs to be made you bring in everyone the situation effects to make it. You start at the level of a household to neighborhood to watershed to biosphere. A charismatic wanabe tyrant will be frustrated every step they take towards getting more power.
Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power. They enable people to guide their own lives and improve their communities. When violence occurs, when agreements are broken the community decided what is too be done.
All that assumes you’re already there. One of the primary differences between anarchists and MLMs (Marxist Leninist Maoists) isn’t necessarily their longest term goals, it’s the means by which they reach them. MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control in order to reach those goals. That brings the risk of capture and co-option of those structures. They’ve also accomplished incredible feats of human uplift so I wouldn’t say their position is without merit.
Anarchists see the revolution coming about through a unity of means and ends. They create a better society by building it while the old one still stands. Their groups are horizontally organized. They create organizations to replace food production and distribution; and devlop strategies for housing distribution (squatting).
Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power
MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control
Are these not different words for the same fundamental concepts?
I fail to see how “the state” and “capitalism” aren’t just a more developed form of “structures” and “agreements”. And if the community decides punishment is an appropriate response to breaking an “agreement”, how is that any different from “coercive control”?
And if you’re community gets large enough (say even like a couple hundred people), how are any decisions gonna get made even remotely efficiently?
Feel like you’re a hop skip and a jump from a representative democracy. And as soon as bartering becomes too inconvenient, I’m sure a new “agreement” still be made to use some proxy as a form of current and boom now you’ve got capitalism too.
I think “more developed” is not great here. It’s assuming because it’s the most common currently and supplanted more anarchist methods that it is better. States and capitalism have benefits that anarchy does not. You can not engage in an anarchist invasion. You can not extract value from a country using colonialism in an anarchist society. This enables capitalist and state control to expand and eventually control the land that anarchist, chieftain led, and other pre state communities once controlled [1]. Capitalism and the state conquered and coerced until it held an almost universal control [2] but that doesn’t mean it’s better to live under.
One of the agreements I have in mind is trading what a farm’s workers need: insurance in case of bad harvest, tools, infrastructure, education, labor, etc for what a city or town needs: food [3]. The “punishment” for breaking such an agreement is not violence. The result is the end of the agreement. That is not coercive control because the other can go to someone else for the same need.
It probably wouldn’t be efficient at large scales [4]. That’s why you make small decisions among those the decision effects. A group might elect a recallable representative for their watershed council and the meeting notes would be distributed to everyone who wanted to read them. However, most decisions about a workplace or neighborhood could probably work by assembly [5]. It is a kind representative democracy but the purpose of anarchy is not ideological purity. The point is creating a society that eliminates as much oppression as possible and enables the most freedom possible.
Bartering, as large scale economic system, is a myth. Gift economies, slavery, stateless communism, and more were far more common. Barter between communities existed but it was the minority of economic activity. The economy I suggest has more in common with Anarcho Communism. To borrow a phrase, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
- The exceptions are legion but they don’t exactly control a lot of land. The San are an example.
- Worshipping Power does a good job examining the transition if you’re interested in reading more.
- Each of those line items could be spread across a miriad of organizations and communities.
- The current system is only efficient at funneling money to the top so I’m not that worried.
- These are just possibilities but I think it’s a workable structure that I would describe as non-heirarchical.
See Democratic Confederalism. https://youtu.be/BKRHyF78j2I?si=5tHIXPtGNI0jW5Jq
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/BKRHyF78j2I?si=5tHIXPtGNI0jW5Jq
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Isn’t that just a liberal social Democratic system for people afraid of the words social and liberal?
Anarchists creating structures and agreements isn’t anarchy anymore, its… well… government.
Anarchy is liberal in the sense that it pursues individual’s freedom not only from oppression but also to act in ways that enrich themselves. It does not require total chaos as it’s detractors have tried to characterize it since the term was coined.
Anarchy is social in the sense it accepts human beings are almost always better off in groups and that society’s goals should be for the betterment of all.
It is democratic in the sense that people come together to make decisions; although, consensus is perhaps a better descriptor. Democracy has an association with first past the post voting and decisions that bind those represented.
It is not a liberal social democracy as that tends to be used to describe a capitalist society with strong social programs, a beauracracy, and police state. They also tend to be supported by colonialism abroad or petrochemical extraction but I suppose that’s not necessarily a requirement. I would agree that such a society is not anarchist.
Structure is not heirarchy. A collective farm is a structure just as much as a factory farm. An agreement where a farm exchanges food for labor, infrastructure, medicine, education, and tools from a city does not preclude anarchy. Either side breaking that agreement when the other begins acting in bad faith is not oppression or a police state.
I’m not very political or versed in the science about them, but does anarchy exclude guidelines and collaboration? I’d have thought it would enhance those things.
If there isn’t anything enforcing rules and laws, a government would be informational, making guidelines based on what people found to work best. Like a giant kickstarter paired with Wikipedia.
Many guidelines will be followed. Like, boil your chicken before eating it. Good to know, and most will do it. Some won’t, for whatever reason.
Think village assembly, fund-raisers, donations.
I might be completely off here. In my mind, people work great together, until there are rules to exploit. The best of us always comes out despite enforcing structures.
Like true Libertarianism, this assumes that people will be perfect, altruistic and cooperative.
They won’t be. Eventually (quickly) someone will become a cult of personality or a bully and seize power.
See: America 2016/2024.
It is true libertarianism in the older socialist sense. It assumes most people will act in their own self interest. It assumes that most people are at their core social. It asserts that the structures of capitalist control: isolation, bigotry, corporate media and more have convinced people to act in destructive ways that neverless enable their survival. Capitalism also enables unempathetic narcissistic people to gain unjustified control over all of our lives.
Power vacuums demand to be filled. Anarchism leaves no openings. When early states began encroaching into stateless societies they had an easy time with patriarchal and other heirarchical societies. Bureaucracies and tyrants were easily subsumed by dethroning a leader and implanting a friendly local. Anarchist societies were another story. They were not habituated to authority, they fought tooth and nail to maintain their anarchy. I don’t have access to my books right now but in a couple days I’ll drop an excerpt from Worshiping Power that goes into detail on a couple of examples.
But humans have short memories. As soon as the pressure is off and the complacency sets in, someone will abuse it.
Anarchism leaves no openings.
The way I see it, anarchism leaves nothing but openings. Your egalitarian paradise only needs one family to want to seize power gather weapons and find like minded people to form a feudal military organization and they can start picking off and dominating families one by one. Individuals would not be able to stand against this centralized power and the time it would take to meet, agree, and mobilize a militia wouldn’t help.
It isn’t that anarchism evolves into feudalism, it’s that it takes centralized power to resist centralized power. And as soon as you start concentrating power, having a standing army with wages, or other centralized systems to pool community resources, that’s government. Even, yes, a descentralized non-capitalist deregulated egalitarian democracy.
It doesn’t bother me that people want this kind of system, it bothers me that people want to call this simplified form of community governance “anarchy” which is by definition “the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government” because as soon as you start imposing rules like “we can expell a murderer if everyone else votes to” it becomes a simple form of communal government and the definition no longer applies.
I see the concept but unfortunately it runs against human nature: humans have an inherent need to follow someone and the emergence of cliques among people result in power struggles for the benefit of their own group.
This is proven incorrect. While many societies throughout history have been heirarchical, many were egalitarian and rejected heirarchy. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, Worshipping Power, and The Dawn of Everything all talk about various early societies many of which reject authoritarian structures. One still existing group of egalitarian societies in Africa is called the San, by all accounts they’ve been around for millenia. I’m not aware of a long lasting egalitarian industrial society but the idea that human beings are incapable of living free from some authority is simply untrue.
A lot of political theory is written in the societal equivalent of an airless room with a frictionless floor. It doesn’t take into account how humans work within the system, especially bad actors.
Which is why the only systems that have ever worked are mixed systems that account for human nature.
A 100% democratic system would have problems because nobody would have any experience or expertise, so people would govern based on ignorance. A 100% communist system doesn’t work because we don’t have a fair system to allocate resources, and as soon as someone becomes in charge of allocating resources, they allocate more for themselves. Even 100% authoritarian systems don’t work because a dictator has to sleep sometime. There may be a figurehead / leader in an authoritarian system, but unless that person delegates some power and control, they’ll be killed and replaced pretty quickly.
Historically the dictator one hasn’t worked well is because every last one has been an actual troglodyte, making moronic decisions after moronic decision. At this point I’m fairly sure only the people with a room temperature IQ want to be dictators. Like I’m sure they would get deposed if they gave out that power but that just hasn’t happened much.
Every now and then Lemmy has an actual discussion like this that gives me hope that it can become more than just an idiotic link aggregator. Thanks!
