Note: don't let "anarchism" put you off because Bookchin's argument applies to other social movements such as environmentalism, religion, movements to improve the food supply, etc.
(I think of Kushi's book "Macrobiotic Diet" as a good example of how one can see the universe in grain of sand. Half of the book is a meditation on how eating a diet appropriate to your bioregion (personal change) can change everything, even prevent nuclear war. The other half is about how Japanese people can and should eat like the people in Gintama. A person in Upstate NY who follows the same logic should eat beans, squash and corn, not seaweed.)
> E.g. It’s NOT about “There was anarchy in the mall today as shoppers demolished the stores and injured eachother fighting over Black Friday deals.”
It always annoyed me how anarchy is conflated with chaos. Nowhere is implied that a lack of coercive hierarchy means to be allowed to smash everything and kill people.
It's a relic of the successful destruction of anarchist unions and parties in the early 20c (especially in the US.) It's similar to how the philosophy of the People's Party (populism) somehow got propagandized from every direction over the next century until it became an epithet suitable to throw at extreme-right authoritarian nationalists.
I agree that it's silly to assume that's what people would do without coercive hierarchy (I think this conflation is often intentional to make the concept less attractive to folks who aren't paying attention), but surely it would be "allowed" because who would be disallowing it?
Some (most?) flavors of anarchy eschew hierarchys, not rules in general. Eg. your local collective or union or guild (depending on your flavor of anarchy) would collectively decide "killing is wrong, here's what happens if someone does it".
Ah, thanks, that's fair since most people are going to make those sort of voluntarist associations. I guess I was imagining an edge case for people who opt to not do that, but that feels an awful lot like when people today make arguments like "well, nobody's forcing you to carry a phone!"
I suppose this all comes back to the point that nobody is pragmatically advocating for absolute anarchy - it's simply a valuable concept to reference as we collaborate to build actual, functioning social systems. Or, at least, that's how I tend to think about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anarchy should be the ultimate (and always moving) goal of any healthy society.
Once hierarchies solve the issues they are born from, they cease to be necessary. Hence a government that permanently solves poverty and thus crime in the most common sense, eliminates the need for an authority to regulate interactions between individuals.
We actually agree, hierarchies can exist and be good, they just need to be voluntary and not in the capitalist sense, where you can "voluntarily" choose between homelessness or wage slavery.
I just wanted to elaborate (since I agree) on your point that Anarchy is "a valuable concept to reference as we collaborate to build actual, functioning social systems".
I won't exclude that Anarchy could eventually concretize though, who knows!
We definitely agree and I also wouldn't exclude that!
I tend to speak this way because I lean towards discussing near and mid-term futures as opposed to longer term ones in many conversations for a number of reasons.
I do this in part because I'm biased toward the now both subconsciously and out of pragmatism as a material being living in the present, but also largely because I find that other people I encounter tend to be even more that way and struggle to envision the longer-term possible that may require a number of intermediate steps.
Dictionaries are neither objectively descriptive nor apolitical - their definitions reflect the biases of their authors and the systems they exist within which allowed them to obtain positions of relative authority.
It's the other way around. Historically "anarchy" almost always had negative connotations. Then Proudhon co-opted the term to use it in a positive sense.
The problem is that there's a million strains of anarchism and none of them agree:
* The political layperson thinks anarchism is a synonym for chaos.
* Anarcho-communists think anarchism comes after the organized demolition of capital because they think the existence of a capitalist class by definition creates exploitation.
* Minarchists think the anarcho-communists aren't actually anarchists because they support a very specific form of structure, namely one that opposes markets. Can you really be free from the state if the state needs to tell you how to structure your commerce?
* Left anarchists (broadly any form of anarchism on the economic left, but mostly anarcho-socialists and anarcho-communists) think libertarians are terrible people because they think capitalistic markets are terrible.
* Libertarians don't understand why an ideology opposing the state still wants a state to tell people what forms of capital relations are allowed.
* Anarcho-syndicalists fit somewhere between the minarchists and the anarcho-socialists.
* Religious anarchists think that anarcho-communists are supplanting faith with belief in Marx's specific dialectical materialism.
* Some anarchists oppose the creation of even large, voluntary bodies of cooperation arguing that they are essentially the same as a state. Therein lies the paradox; if participants agree fairly to opt-into forming their own para-state, is this still compatible under anarchism?
* Green anarchists insist that small, distributed networks of mutual aid can hit environmental goals but grapple with the reality that the number of people on the planet alive today are alive at the behest of heavily centralized systems and processes.
and on and on. It doesn't help that by virtue of being minority/upopular ideologies, adherents find a lot more political capital in being uncompromisingly fundamental rather than practical. The minarchist in the corner telling you that issues are complicated, producing long nuanced theses, and urging compromise is boring while the fiery communist telling you to cleanse humanity to build labor relations anew Khmer Rouge style strikes passion into your heart.
It turns out that simply rejecting "coercive relations" or "the State" doesn't lay out a vision that others can agree with, especially because many parties don't agree on what constitutes a coercive relation or the State. In other words, if you tell Hobbes that the Leviathan is unnecessary, you should be prepared to say what comes in its place as that's where everyone disagrees.
You can see this dynamic play out in other comment threads on this story.
The irony is that I can argue that this overview is too simplistic and reductive and even too opinionated. I don't think I got a good impression of what a minarchist or an anarcho-syndicalist is from this either. Then it's like what are religious anarchists for then? Christian anarchism?
> Can you really be free from the state if the state needs to tell you how to structure your commerce?
Wouldn't many anarchists take issue with the minarchist & libertarian critique you list above, claiming that the state is necessary to enforce capitalistic markets?
I can't claim to be a libertarian, but I don't think minarchists claim to espouse an economic system at all. You may be thinking of left market anarchists. And I'm pretty sure some libertarians will make their point with private force applied to consenting market participants used to secure their capital markets.
Also this isn't meant to be an exercise in ideological critique so there's no need to defend what "many anarchists" think. My post was just there to demonstrate how many strains of anarchism there are and how few goals they tend to share. Also it's partly to remind folks that there are more than just Ancoms and Ansocs out there, even if they tend to be the most vocal in tech spaces.
My reply was a little ambiguous - I simply meant that many anarchists would find the minarchist and libertarian positions you lay out to be self-contradictory. Namely, they both claim to (mostly) oppose state involvement in the economy, yet (generally) support a free market economy that needs to be enforced by the state.
I'm agreeing with your premise that anarchism consists of many competing strains, just adding a point of clarification for the audience here (...which is probably more familiar with the libertarian perspective than the others you listed).
The pattern of splitting within the revolutionary left is notable, and perhaps similar to similar patterns within protestant christianity. And perhaps just as various protestant consciousness patterns became universalized, so too are the ways of thought of the old revolutionary left.
Alas those who dont have motivation to self-select forward tend to get left behind, end up in a big, easy to manipulate block. The un-motivated & tuned-out end up centralized.
The revolutionary rightwingers are endlessly fragmentary - the militia, white supremacy and various theocratic movements each have a ton of complicated history of fragmentation and infighting.
I suspect the phenomenon is partly a function of relative powerlessness combined with the emotional high-stakes of being marginalized combined with the personalities attracted to such groups.
> perhaps similar to similar patterns within protestant christianity
Dead on. Once you eschew centralized authority, the group fracturing as everybody discovers their own slightly different version of truth seems inevitable.
... it's a feature that makes Protestant Christianity relatively healthy. Salvation is between you and God, no terrestrial authority can say "you've displeased me, you're going to Hell". Or rather, they can, but you're free to go to the church across the street which believes roughly the same thing.
This is backwards! Religion should not adapt itself to the people. It is not a democracy. How can an organization claim to represent the will of god when they are shaped by the market process you describe into an average of human desires?
How can an organization claim to represent the will of God at all? There is no salvation except that which is negotiated between the individual and God (or many gods, or no gods, or what have you). No Earthly church or temple or synagogue or mosque or coven or what have you has the authority to dictate how you connect with the broader universe in which you exist.
The knowability of god seems itself a false & deceitful pretense. Accepting any organizations interprettation of what facts tales & stories they have seems to many like folly.
We have to listen, quietly & somewhat individually & in small groups, for the heartbeat of god. The only earnest truth is that it's a interpretation.
Because if enough people dislike what God is telling them, they'll leave for the church across the street that says that God has, in fact, revealed something slightly different and more agreeable.
I think it’s a feature of most extreme ideologies - an above commenter points out the endless fragmentation of the extreme right between religious and racial ideologies
Bookchin's willingness to pit autonomy v. freedom against each other is the big weakness of this essay. What is autonomy without freedom? What is freedom without autonomy? The reality is that these necessitate one another, not that they contradict one another. Same deal with his characterization of the individual v. society: contrary to what he asserts, society is the product of individuals just as much as individuals are the product of society. To suppress any individual is to suppress society, and to suppress society is to suppress every other individual.
At the end of the day, there is no "individualist anarchy" or "collectivist anarchy" because both individualism and collectivism, when taken to their logical conclusions, produce the very unjust hierarchies to which anarchism is fundamentally and definitionally opposed. A stateless - i.e. anarchist - society by definition is unable to elevate the individual over the collective or vice versa, nor should it attempt to do so - because, again, doing so would only serve to suppress both.
Either Bookchin doesn't realize this (I seriously doubt that) or he does but decided to throw the entirety of non-collectivist anarchism under the bus to dunk on hippies - which I mean, sure, go for it, but one can dunk on hippies without spending a third of the essay on what boils down to "Kropotkin rules and Stirner drools" and another third on "collectivism is more anarchist than individualism because reasons".
this is a little old-man-yells-at-cloud but the cultural moment of the 90s did have its problems. it's stabilized a bit with a wider acknowledgement of intersectionality. nihilism becomes a source of motivation, and social theory provides the consciousness.
> it's stabilized a bit with a wider acknowledgement of intersectionality.
And perhaps one could say that many culture/lifestyle-focused people have moved closer to the political mainstream and effectively let go of the pretense to challenge the economic social order.
no, i don't think so. if anything the possible and accepted challenges have become deeper and more radical, due to the proliferation of anarchist culture and attitudes among widespread disillusion. the mainstream has moved towards anarchists.
this has surfaced a lot of highly visible "radlibs", who talk but don't walk, but posers appear alongside any cultural position.
> they [the libertarians] reveal an anarchism very much at odds with itself
Oh the irony in being able to call this out on the people who believe in a variation of what you believe but not being able to see that the exact same is true for your own overlapping beliefs.
We need to form a collective around the idea that all organized social structures are evil! Unite in disunity!
Organized anarchism is an inherently ridiculous idea. You don't even have to make it passed the title to see that it's an irreconcilable contradiction.
> We need to form a collective around the idea that all organized social structures are evil! Unite in disunity!
Anarchism, as the term is used in this context, is absolutely not about opposing all organized social structures. It's specifically about opposing coercive structures. The goal is typically organization through bottom-up, cooperative means rather than via an authority enforcing structure from the top down.
I hear this a lot, but it's incredibly tautological. "We only oppose coercive structures" yeah like is there anybody on earth that endorses coercive structures?
Or the closely related variant, "we only oppose unjust hierarchies". yeah right.
> is there anybody on earth that endorses coercive structures?
Yes? Prisons are openly coercive, as are taxes, not to mention the use of military force to enforce economic benefit. Lots of people openly back these concepts and institutions (including the qualities that make them coercive) with justifications like, "if we didn't coerce some people, our society wouldn't be able to function".
Which just furthers my point, that "coercive" is in the eye of the beholder, making your statement tautological: "we only oppose structures that we oppose". No, fyi, most people would not consider prisons, taxes or the military to be "coercive", and neither would I.
If your definition of coercive is anything that doesn't entirely align with anybody's utility function, I'm curious as to what you wouldn't consider coercive.
Political systems don't define the nature of a system, the political leadership does. Because in the end any system of rules doesn't really mean much when it's up to the political establishment of a country to enforce those rules. Democracies can bring great oppression, dictatorships can bring great freedom. The history of Ancient Greece/Rome are more than sufficient evidence of this, to avoid the hornet's nest that is contemporary society.
The main strength of a democracy is in stability. It ideally creates the perception of the ability to change one's political future with a vote, which means people are less likely to resort to the methods they must to change their political future under an e.g. dictatorship. Of course when that perception collapses, we're back to square one.
It sounds like you haven't contended much with the context behind the distinctions, maybe because you've been socialized into believing you willfully and freely consented to the coercive structures you inhabit.
Anarchists have the same problem they did when I first ran into them before Facebook: they don't handle crimes like sexual assault well.
I skipped queercon at my Defcon because of rumors I heard, rumors that were confirmed, about rampant physical and sexual abuse by so called "anarchists". And then, at my second, someone made a show of telling me I'm not a "n00b" and I cannot have a hacker handle, because I hadn't wanted to a shot of alcohol on stage the previous year. So I told the entire conference OK, fine, my legal name is Gregory, but my hacker name is Greg.
On my end, it feels like folks treat political ideology like favorite strains of techno or whatever.
I don't care if you're a Communist, a democratic socialist, anarcho-communist, Democratic sociaist, a green, a furry, a goon, a progressive, an anarcho-syndicalist, a "left libertarian" or whatever goddamn label you want to put on yourself, if my perception is you claim to not "believe" in things like borders as you very purposefully do as many crimes as possible to bring yourself pleasure, then get on a plane to Berghain or Britain or whatever to do it all over again and demand folks just respect your "mutual association" or some crap.
Well, it's why you see me doing things like not post for years at a time then slam espresso and spend the day making it very clear what MY opinions are.
It's why I spent the entirety of the Trump administration focused on learning as many technical skills as I could, in preparation for events exactly like what unfolded on January 6th -- because I believe in democracy, and republicanism, and that then, within that framework, people can go do anarchism or whatever, and not interact with "the state" as long as they don't run around raping everyone they come across like Jacob Appelbaum[1], Morgan Marquis-Boire[2] and Joshua Schulte[3] did.
I cannot emphasize how personally offended I was to find out the kinds of behavior that were tolerated by so called "civil society".
It's why I'm posting as hard as I am today, after spending last night sending out a series of messages on the encrypted line to the effect of "Why do we tolerate these people? Do I need to act like them to be accepted by the hacker community and use my technical skills?"
I am not the enemy of the anarchists. I want people to be able to have a nice day. But I will ruin your day, ever day, as I spent every dime of my meager retirement fund, because I am THAT tired of feeling retaliated against for making good decisions. Because the rumors are true: I'm an insufferable troll when I'm in bad mood.
I'm not required to be quiet, I'm not required to respect your privacy, and I will literally hack you one by one if I need to (hopefully with a computer), if it will fix the toxic culture I see in the hacker community, where you cannot distinguish between words in a formal whitepaper and words written on the fly after an espresso and a taro bun, because if you break the social contract, we're operating under natural law, and I'm a white man with money, IQ, and skill, and I don't intend to use it to kill a bunch of Iraqis or whatever, and never have, and I'm tired of being made to feel ashamed for that.
So maybe instead of picking apart my phrasing, some people on this site should be absolutely terrified that I can write like this with zero preparation, when it would take them years to achieve this level of skill in prose.
Then maybe look up the concept of a "libelle"[4]
>Of all the public figures subjected to such vicious derision and gossip (often highly inaccurate gossip at that), Marie Antoinette was singled out for especially inventive and vicious taunting. True to French tradition, the slanderous pamphlets, called libelles, were fond of wordplay. For the Austrian-born Antoinette, they coined Austrichienne, meaning “Austrian bitch,” but also resembling the French word for “ostrich.” Thus, layering a visual pun upon a verbal one, one artist actually portrayed Antoinette stroking a massive, ostrich-like penis, complete with legs and a saddle. Mounted upon the penile steed was progressive royalist Marquis de Lafayette, who sympathized with the peasants but was eventually denounced as a traitor by Robespierre (revolutionaries tend not to be terribly fond of diplomatic fence-straddlers).
Then after reading about THAT, educate yourself on libel, specifically that in my state[5][6], though I usully strive to tell the truth, if you want to question my integriry, YOU will need to prove what I said was false to move forward, because this is like the fall of the USSR, and I very purposefully set things up so even if a bullet came through the window now, at least I'd know my enemies will die much more unpleasantly.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/sources...
[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2017/10/open-letter-sexual-assault/
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-ca...
[4] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/05/the-necessity-of-poli...
[5] McLibel: burger culture on trial by John Vidal (Macmillan, 1997; New Press, 1998) ISBN 0-333-69461-9 (hardcover), ISBN 0-330-35237-7 (paperback), ISBN 1-56584-411-4 (US). Afterword by Steel and Morris
[6] The original case lasted nearly ten years which, according to the BBC, made it the longest-running libel case in English history.[1] McDonald's announced it did not plan to collect the £40,000 it was awarded by the courts.[2] Following the decision, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in Steel & Morris v United Kingdom the pair had been denied a fair trial, in breach of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to a fair trial) and their conduct should have been protected by Article 10 of the Convention, which protects the right to freedom of expression. The court awarded a judgment of £57,000 against the UK government.[3] McDonald's itself was not involved in, or a party to, this action, as applications to the ECHR are independent cases filed against the relevant state.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case
> if my perception is you claim to not "believe" in things like borders as you very purposefully do as many crimes as possible to bring yourself pleasure, then get on a plane to Berghain or Britain or whatever to do it all over again and demand folks just respect your "mutual association" or some crap.
Yes, you either need town walls (e.g. borders) or you need a legal apparatus that coordinates over a large area. Otherwise, you get people like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, traveling town-to-town committing crimes, leaving in fast cars before they can be held to account by local authorities. Walling off every town obviously wasn't practical, so instead the FBI was formed. Anarchists prefer to talk theory and abstract principles, rather than concrete policy that address unfortunate realities like this.
> Yes, you either need town walls (e.g. borders) or you need a legal apparatus that coordinates over a large area.
Or you need a populace that's able and willing to defend itself against the John Dillingers and Baby Face Nelsons of the world. Deterrence begets peace; helplessness begets violence.
That's the issue with society right now. The attitude of "you can't put your hands on people, call the police" clashing with the attitude of "you're a nuisance to 911, you need to invoke stand your ground and be a man".
What often happens is whether violence was on centers on who you did it to, rather than the circumstances leading up to the event, which is why I'm no longer as fond of stand your ground as I was back when I had to do things like yell at a frat boy who yelled "You can't curse at me, I know your professor" after literally crossing a street to throw a sieg heil "We're not at school you drunk nazi, get ready to call an ambulance".
He ran away as I started reaching into my pocket and yelled I was gonna put him against the wall of the parking garage across from Kilroy's, but I think he learned to never cross the street and scream nazi crap in front of the guy who passive aggressively quotes the crypto anarchist manifesto and Jim Bell every time his adviser forces him to guest lecture her class since he's technically got a research assistantship, is only covering the lecture to be kind, and never even really learned geometry properly let alone calculus in special ed, but is somehow now a "crypto" expert.
(As in cryptography. Bitcoin is for weirdos - use cash, or maybe a gift card paid for with it if you insist on not touching cash friends.)
Well you can do as you wish I suppose, but personally I would rather avoid getting into gun battles with machinegun toting bank robbers. Better for the government to hire some men to do it for the rest of us. You know, like police.
>Yes, you either need town walls (e.g. borders) or you need a legal apparatus that coordinates over a large area.
Or a mechanism to decide who is a resident, with access to social services etc.
I want to read up on how Switzerland does it -- I heard some cantons, you need permission of the community to settle, but I don't know if that works in the spirit intended or if you're a non-white / European refugee they'd just vote you away even if you follow democratic norms etc.
> Anarchists ... don't handle crimes like sexual assault well.
Who does? Seriously the terrible things that a small group of people do to one another is very hard to deal with. In my communities (anarchist adjacent?) we have had exactly this problem. We do better now, but we are all older and have excluded the bad people. (Where did they go? What are they doing now?)
The "hackers" have a reputation for being a white boy's club war whooping and "big penis" strutting. Yes. Try reporting a bug in emacs (Or Audacity.). Get screamed at that you are such a fool as to have reported a bug you installed on your system with out downloading compiling and installing source.
What pricks. Love their work, their software, they are probably noce to animals, but what pricks.
It is not like that everywhere. The community around Rust has gone in totally the opposite direction.
Things change and (hopefully) get better. I hope the "Eternal September" is finally coming to an end and we will start working together with love and respect rather than "strutting our stuff" at the expense of others.
>The "hackers" have a reputation for being a white boy's club war whooping and "big penis" strutting.
I've gotten women internships, tenure, and away from violence in the moment, I'm exhausted by feeling like I have to go above and beyond because some people who share my skin tone are rude when I'm a queer, autistic trauma survivor who often missed out on opprotunities because that type of thing doesn't result in affirmitive action.
>It is not like that everywhere. The community around Rust has gone in totally the opposite direction.
I don't know much about programming, it's why I stick to Python -- anything I wrote in C would be riddled with bugs. Do you mind reminding me what the appeal of Rust was, something about "type safety"? The folks I met who were stanning it weren't fun to be around, so I never tried it out.
>I hope the "Eternal September" is finally coming to an end and we will start working together with love and respect rather than "strutting our stuff" at the expense of others.
I think things in the long term will be better, but in the short term it's a lot like what led to WWII -- you had a bunch of ex Prussian or whatever military officers then who struggled to adjust to democracy/republicanism.
In America, you have folks who volunteered to do war crimes, got traumatized, then hid that trauma to maintain access to firearms since most jobs that give extra points (veteran's preferece) are things like police officer if you're not rocking a buck twenty five IQ and want a decent wage.
I sympathize with folks who became officers to get an education and found ways to do useful work, but I cannot emphasize enough how thoroughly digusted with the level of aggessive entitlement I saw from some veterans during the pandemic, and almost all of the ones acting out in that manner were white guys.
(Eg someone comes into a store without a mask, pre vaccine, gets belligerent possibly due to effects of PTSD or maybe just narcicistic injury, then yells I JUST CAME FROM THE VA YOU MAGGOT and literally starts to urinate on themselves when someone comes up and yells right back I DO NOT CARE, SHUT UP.
They can dish it out, but not take it.
To this day I have an exagerated startle response from interactions like that back before PA rolled out the vaccine to my group (unemployed non-boomers), because members of the hacker community refused to acknowledge my technical skills for political reasons.
One of the reasons that a lot of rape is not reported is because the "testimony" is extracted in an adversarial setting from the victim him or her self. The victim is then likely (depending on local laws of evidence) to have his or her lifestyle put on trial. To be portrayed as a "slut" with regrets.
It is a system set up by what a lot of people reasonable define as "rape culture".
Not to be unreasonably down on social democracy, it is just that dealing with the horrid things that happens sometimes (rarely we hope) between people away from witnesses is very difficult for any community.
>One of the reasons that a lot of rape is not reported is because the "testimony" is extracted in an adversarial setting from the victim him or her self
I know. The only reason I got a CCR number for my assault was because the cop started to give a damn when they found out the person wasn't white.
>It is a system set up by what a lot of people reasonable define as "rape culture". Not to be unreasonably down on social democracy, it is just that dealing with the horrid things that happens sometimes (rarely we hope) between people away from witnesses is very difficult for any community.
That's why I also encourage folks to keep a knife in their purse.
When I say "testimony is evidence" the testimony can be "He tried to rape me, so I stabbed him in the throat like it was an episode of The Americans."
(Sorry for being flippant, it's been a rough COVID.)
In my experience, "democratic socialists" aren't as upfront about being sexually abusive as techno-anarchists. They're more about roping people into sex to be a part of the scene because that's SO totally revolutionary against monogamous heteronormativity or whatever word salad.
I think it's more like if you don't have a "partner", you can't afford to move to a big city like New York or DC, absent a technical degree that lets you have the equivalent of a dual income.
Then you have people who have more resources basically exploit that a year can be a long time.
Go back and listen to some Dan Savage calls from the twenty aughts. Both anarchists and democratic socialists seem to love that guy for some reason.
(Once I started having sex with girls too, and he couldn't seem to stop being weirdly transphobic, I stopped listening, though I appreciated being able to answer HIS question when he came to my university -- Danny boy definitely knows crypto means cryptography.)
Go back into the archives: when they're not being advised on how to produce the largest craps to literally poop on their partners (lots of lettuce apparently), they're often quite sociopathically[1] treating romance with this this weird attitude of "you told me the rules, and absent a just cause, you can't just dump (fire) me".
You can. Romance, like any other uh... "mutual association", is a form of at will employment, for lack of better phrasing.
In the real world, you can, in five seconds, go from first name basis to friends with one of the most powerful hackers in the world to "Mr" or "Ms" X even if you have a teaching certificate, doctorate or MD, because outside WORK folks don't really give a damn about your credentials - say the wrong thing, on the wrong day, you will be told to get in the ground with Jeffrey Epstein if you ever go out of your element that badly ever again and that hacker will never, ever help you again.
[1] There's a network of self identified sociopaths who've infiltrated the tech policy community BTW -- it's one of the reasons they closed that Russian embassy in Seattle, or so I heard in the hall at Defcon. Don't adopt a diagnosis like it's a Dalmatian born in the early 90s, it will end badly in both cases.
"Anarchism’s failure to resolve this tension, to articulate the relationship of the individual to the collective, and to enunciate the historical circumstances that would make possible a stateless anarchic society produced problems in anarchist thought that remain unresolved to this day."
Its resolved for me. And no doubt for you - think of a family gathering - you didn't need the police (or the state) there to manage things for you. All you need to do is apply the golden rule (from wiki):
* Treat others as you would like others to treat you (positive or directive form)
* Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated (negative or prohibitive form)
The negative form is better. So, no one has a right to cause harm to another. (Of course they can cause harm, but its not right.) A group of people that think the same thing, also do not have the right to cause harm to others (where 'cause' = 'initiate'.)
This isn't to say that if harm is caused to you, you don't have the right to respond - you have the right to defend yourself.
Now consider - despite the general impression - how many times has another individual harmed you? Now, contrast that with how many times has the government initiated violence against you (forcible payment of tax, jay walking, drinking beer in public, or whatever, parking fines, licenses, etc). When force is there as a threat, even if it is not being overtly used, it is still the use of force. If I don't do something I want to do, that doesn't harm another, because of the threat of force (fines, imprisonment, etc) that is violence being inflicted on me.
So, the governance structure will have you believe that without policemen etc the world would descend into chaos. But government itself is the worst abuser! It initiates harm and violence everywhere, all day, every day. And it has convinced individuals to do this for it (policemen, soldiers, doctors, teachers) by calling it 'right' in its courts (regardless of the golden rule). The governance structure says it IS ok to initiate harm (if it says so) for money (that it prints).
Its a trick - and it has resulted in misguided order-followers who do wrong all day (but call it right), for the benefit of an elite group.
Such is life. If people followed their conscience and heart, we wouldn't be in this mess.
You don't need Leviathan (the state) to control the actions of ordinary people so much as you need it to prevent the ambitious few from taking control. That's the instability of anarchism.
> "Groups under a certain size (Dunbar * ?) can be managed socially with personal reputation and shame and shunning and all that."
You're just trading one hierarchy for another; an official and overt hierarchy traded for an unspoken social popularity hierarchy. Like students in highschool, officially everybody is on the same footing with each other. But in reality the pecking order exists and is rigidly enforced through 'personal reputation and shame and shunning and all that.' Nasty and manipulative people often rise to the top in this sort of environment.
Oh yeah, I'm not saying it's fun for everyone. But when people say we don't need a state because humans can naturally organize themselves, that's the organization. And it only really works up to a certain number.
This comment and the replies are based on incorrect assumptions.
Is this context the words "hierarchy" and "authority" are used exclusively to refer to the coercive aspect that can exist. Anarchism does not oppose social organization in itself!
The whole point about "unspoken social popularity" and tyranny of of structurelessness is based on a misunderstanding.
> Is this context the words "hierarchy" and "authority" are used exclusively to refer to the coercive aspect that can exist. Anarchism does not oppose social organization in itself!
I think the point is that even in the absence of explicit hierarchy, you can still have coercion in the form of shaming/shunning/etc.
I'll recommend to bystanders (I assume you're already familiar with it from your comment), the seminal "Tyranny of Structurelessness", which makes this point lucidly.
I love this essay and I've shared it with many anarchists (or "anarchists") who have dismissed it entirely without engaging in the ideas at all.
I'm fairly anarchist-leaning, but I definitely see the applications for authority and hierarchy, specifically in the contexts of justice and finite resource distribution.
> Groups under a certain size (Dunbar * ?) can be managed socially with personal reputation and shame and shunning and all that.
In the absence of a (strong) state, those sorts of groups will just become clans/tribes that act like a proto-state. Just look at the problems of governance in Afghanistan.
Many people in Afghanistan have a long, specific religious and cultural history supporting, among other things, patriarchal organization. We shouldn't think of the current situation in Afghanistan as the natural outcome of any random large group of people existing outside a modern nation-state.
> Many people in Afghanistan have a long, specific religious and cultural history supporting, among other things, patriarchal organization.
Right, this is the kind of thing that tends to emerge in the absence of a formal state. You get a proto-state supported by the local culture and traditions.
That's a little backwards: something like the modern state might emerge from groups of people living in any number of ways. Clans/tribes don't emerge from the lack of a state. The state as we think of it is very recent in human history, after all.
Also you originally referred to the "problems of governance in Afghanistan" which I took to mean the warlordism, violence, suppression of women and so on. I was pointing out that these problems are more tied to the specific cultural and religious history of that area. If by governance problems you were instead referring to the strictly administrative or bureaucratic challenges you might encounter trying to, for example, organize a collection of peaceful worker communes, then I misunderstood.
I don't totally understand your response. "Clans/tribes", which I think you originally used as a catch-all for the many and varied forms of local government over the past ten+ millennia of human history, predate the modern state. They don't emerge from the lack or absence of a state any more than freedom arises from the lack or absence of a jail.
All of my comments have been, I hope respectfully, pushing back on the implication that the modern nation-state is the natural form of government and that in its absence people will necessarily find themselves members of small, violently feuding patriarchal groups.
Those sorts of clans/tribes are a lot larger than Dunbar's number. But you're right that they're the first and easiest step in actual large-scale social organization.
That's what makes it so hard. If I had to describe what "the real problem" is today it's that the capture of the state by powerful interests undermines the legitimacy of the state and limits the state's ability to face hard problems like climate change.
You don't need Leviathan to do that. You could have a cultural custom so that anyone reaching a certain level of power or wealth or social status must give enough of it up to come back to the normal level.
1. Say you have a society with such a custom. Say someone violates it, passing that level of power and wealth and still trying to get more. Now what? In particular, they have significant power. How are you going to enforce the custom on them? Or can they freely violate it if they're willing to break societal norms?
2. Say your society doesn't have such a custom (which is most existing societies). Now what? How do you mold society into such a consensus that nobody will think of violating it? Do you think that creating such a consensus is easier than creating a government to limit the power of the powerful?
1. Power in human society is social and contextual. If there's a custom to limit your status and you violate that, you can be ejected from the group and then your status goes down to nothing. This sort of thing happens all the time. If you play casual sports with friends and then one person trains up to pro level, they'll need to take a handicap or no one will play with them, because having one player dominate the game is no fun, and allowing the pro would twist the whole social vibe into a metagame of currying favor.
2. I don't agree with you about most societies. Most people prefer their own social circles to have similar ability, intelligence, income, even physical attractiveness. That's the revealed preference for a society. We're not ants or bees that choose hierarchies when we don't have to. So by existing societies I assume you mean, the one global society that manifests differently everywhere but is really all the same and can't be escaped. Since people hate hierarchy it will not surprise you when I point out that this particular society only exists due to extreme violence and disinformation. So instead of thinking about molding a consensus, let's think instead about removing the violence and disinformation and then we can see what people really want. As for the easiest way of doing that, I don't know, but at least we don't need to go around saying that the current system is necessary.
1. That works fine, for a small group. But I live in a city of a million people, and I don't know most of them. If one of them acquires too much control over the food supply, say, what are we going to do? Not invite them to parties? Their parties will have food at them.
2. Again, what you say is true in the small. But my city shows no such preference, and we're all trying to live together here. So, no, I don't mean "one global society", but I mean something much larger than my ultimate frisbee group.
> Since people hate hierarchy it will not surprise you when I point out that this particular society only exists due to extreme violence and disinformation.
Don't put words in my mouth (or reactions in my emotions), especially ones I don't agree with. This society exists due to much less violence and much less disinformation than the historical norm; I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "only existing due to violence and disinformation". That may be your characterization; it certainly isn't mine. Nor do I think that "people hate hierarchy" is a fair characterization.
In fact, I think you're mistaking your preferences for a universal. And I think you're taking what your ideology says about society as the truth, without honestly evaluating society.
> 1. That works fine, for a small group. But I live in a city of a million people, and I don't know most of them. If one of them acquires too much control over the food supply, say, what are we going to do? Not invite them to parties? Their parties will have food at them.
Control is social. One person cannot literally control the food supply in the sense that they personally created all of it, guard it like a dragon, and distribute it. Many other people are involved at all steps. If the would-be dragon violates social norms on not being a hoarding jerk, they can be ejected. If your response is now something like "It's not literally one person but they will have guards and police, now what?", this starts getting into the discussion about violence.
> 2. Again, what you say is true in the small. But my city shows no such preference, and we're all trying to live together here. So, no, I don't mean "one global society", but I mean something much larger than my ultimate frisbee group.
To clarify, by global society I meant the one society dominated by European-style nation-states where money can buy anything, or at least a good substitute. With enough money you can monopolize the food supply or anything else. Where is there a strong, what we might call legally-enforceable rule against being rich? If such a place existed and mattered, it would be bought out or made illegal.
The point I'm making is that all societies today above "the small" are manifestations of the global society I just mentioned, created in Europe hundreds of years ago and spread in multiple waves throughout the world. So if we're counting up societies that permit extreme wealth differences and those that don't, in the first group we have: today's global society and a handful of historical and invariably brutal kingdoms and empires; in the second group we have: all "small" societies today and the vast majority of human societies before encountering early modern European expansion. The societies permitting extreme wealth are weird aberrations in world history. We should not count every modern city as an independent data point about what kind of society people prefer.
For (1) and (2): as far as the number of people, the way to do it would be decentralized. A neural network is an example. Or your brain: a cell in your brain's right hemisphere may never interact with a cell in the left hemisphere, yet your brain works. A more real-world political example would be a collection of neighborhood councils and guilds in a city, as just one option.
> Don't put words in my mouth (or reactions in my emotions), especially ones I don't agree with.
That was a rhetorical statement, a more cutesy way of saying "A, therefore B." I'm sorry if it bothered you.
> This society exists due to much less violence and much less disinformation than the historical norm; I don't think it's fair to characterize it as "only existing due to violence and disinformation". That may be your characterization; it certainly isn't mine.
Today's society is mostly due to fossil fuel and a little bit due to technical advancement. The vast inequalities are what are due to violence and disinformation. Imagine a job where all your output is given to your boss and all you get is a cot to sleep on and simple food. What would it take for you to stay at that job? How do you think a unionization effort would go? Could you use the word "violence" to describe any of this? Now consider that as of 2020, 2153 billionaires had more wealth than 4.6 billion people: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-....
> Nor do I think that "people hate hierarchy" is a fair characterization.
>
> In fact, I think you're mistaking your preferences for a universal. And I think you're taking what your ideology says about society as the truth, without honestly evaluating society.
It's important to distinguish consensual hierarchy from forced hierarchy. A group can agree to let someone lead in some area where they are skilled: we'll let you drive the car because you're a better driver. I don't think anyone likes forced hierarchy though: I will beat you if you don't let me drive. I don't think that's an ideological preference.
But do you think that many people prefer associating with people with much different skill, intelligence, education or income? For example, would you like to be on a programming team where you could clearly rank skill from worst to best? If so, I'd be interested in having you walk me through why you think that.
> If the would-be dragon violates social norms on not being a hoarding jerk, they can be ejected. If your response is now something like "It's not literally one person but they will have guards and police, now what?", this starts getting into the discussion about violence.
Yes, I agree, it's never just one person. And yes, there's probably going to be violence when someone threatens the food supply. But that's exactly one of the things that bugs me about anarchy. It seems to me that it is vulnerable to a group that is willing to use violence in greater intensity (or with greater organization) than the anarchy is able to employ in return.
And if you're going to say that anarchy can decide to do violence, yes, I agree. But it seems to me that centuries of experience have shown that those most effective at doing violence are very thoroughly organized, which seems to me to be kind of the opposite of anarchy.
> So if we're counting up societies that permit extreme wealth differences and those that don't, in the first group we have: today's global society and a handful of historical and invariably brutal kingdoms and empires; in the second group we have: all "small" societies today and the vast majority of human societies before encountering early modern European expansion.
I think that's a rather ahistorical perspective. Take, for example, China or India around 1000. Or Mali, whose emperor Mansa Musa is believed to have been the wealthiest individual in history. Or the Aztec or Inca empires. Or...
I'll give you that the Aztecs and Incas were brutal. I don't know about Mali. But if you're going to say that China and India were brutal, then you're going to have to say that most of history was brutal.
> But do you think that many people prefer associating with people with much different skill, intelligence, education or income? For example, would you like to be on a programming team where you could clearly rank skill from worst to best? If so, I'd be interested in having you walk me through why you think that.
I'm in an ultimate frisbee group where there's some fairly clear distinctions in skill level. It's not quite a strict hierarchy, because skill has multiple axes - someone could be slower but have a better handle. Still, there are definitely better players and worse players. But we just divide into approximately equal-strength teams, and go have fun.
> > Don't put words in my mouth (or reactions in my emotions), especially ones I don't agree with.
> That was a rhetorical statement, a more cutesy way of saying "A, therefore B." I'm sorry if it bothered you.
Well, others here do it sometimes with malice, or at least with manipulative intent, so I've become rather sensitive to it. Sorry if I jumped on you.
> Yes, I agree, it's never just one person. And yes, there's probably going to be violence when someone threatens the food supply.
The trick is to stop the problem before violence is a possibility, for example rotate who is in control of the food supply, or ensure a distributed food surplus so that any interruptions can be dealt with in time. It's important though to also imagine a society where people can count on having their basic needs met and everyone is integrated into the social network, in which case wanting to order people around would be thought of as perverse, and someone taking over some vital resource for personal gain wouldn't be a problem you'd need to constantly prepare for.
> But it seems to me that centuries of experience have shown that those most effective at doing violence are very thoroughly organized, which seems to me to be kind of the opposite of anarchy.
I think this is a historical accident. We can name many centralized organizations today, companies and countries, with completely inept leadership. Conversely we can look at the history of trade unions, or the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, for flatter organizations that did well. Arguably the overthrow of the Tsarist government by the Bolsheviks is another example, in the sense that they accomplished their literal goal of taking over, not in the sense that the authoritarian rule that followed was good (it wasn't).
It may very well be that when push comes to shove centralized organizations outperform organizations with more decentralized leadership in certain crucial ways but I don't think we've had a good test yet to say either way. Nor, I hope we agree, should we say that just because a particular system is better at violence that it's a better system in general.
> I think that's a rather ahistorical perspective.
It's hard to say because it's the relatively recent flood of fossil fuels that have allowed for extreme wealth and thus extreme wealth differences. But today's society might be the first where only money matters. Even in historic actual empires, social rules could constrain the emperor and wealth generally. If nothing else anyone rich enough to rival the emperor or god-king might be killed.
The history of kings and rulers is full of horrifying anecdotes such as being buried with servants or mutilating political opponents. Crucially this brutality is associated with the rulers and not the everyday people. Were some better than others, sure, but I think that we'd find every king or emperor with a non-trivial reign routinely used means to maintain their rule that both we and their contemporary subjects would consider terrible.
> I'm in an ultimate frisbee group where there's some fairly clear distinctions in skill level. It's not quite a strict hierarchy, because skill has multiple axes - someone could be slower but have a better handle. Still, there are definitely better players and worse players. But we just divide into approximately equal-strength teams, and go have fun.
Thank you for sharing. I'll point out though that even though you're happy with the situation, the skill discrepancies are something that you are working around and not seeking out. Maybe it would be easier if everyone was roughly the same and people could group off in any old random way.
> Well, others here do it sometimes with malice, or at least with manipulative intent, so I've become rather sensitive to it. Sorry if I jumped on you.
No problem, in fact I'm trying to work on speaking more plainly so I appreciate the call-out.
You think because you don't see them, that the ambitious few aren't already in control. They have been, for millennia, I think. They were the kings and popes, but now they are whoever owns the banks and governance infrastructure - and I'm not talking about shareholders! The reality we perceive is not unfolding naturally - it is planned and you can read about it.
Great, you've considered the case of N ~= 100. Don't need a state to manage that.
How about N ~= 1,000,000,000?
Anarchism (and any fully decentralized protocol) "works" for small N because the average node can keep all the other nodes of the society in memory. If you need something, you know exactly whom to ask. And if you do something wrong, everyone will remember and hold you accountable. This plainly doesn't work with millions of nodes. Same principle why Bitcoin will never take off without hacking on traditional centralized finance mechanisms like Lightning; at some N, the resources required for individual nodes to maintain an accurate representation of the entire network becomes impractical (either impossible or just way too slow).
How many gatherings of a billion people have you attended?
Nobody actually has direct relationships with a billion people. That's why there is no need to "solve" the "problem" of how to centrally coordinate a network with a billion nodes. The coordination happens spontaneously as people voluntarily interact with the people they directly know. In economics, this mechanism is called a "free market".
In our globalized world, it is absolutely possible to interact with a set of a billion different individuals via social media, commerce, et cetera. Of course there are no physical gatherings of a billion people; that is a strawman.
But for sake of argument, let's move N down to 10,000 (a small city or large crowd). How do you manage that without hierarchical organization and government?
> In our globalized world, it is absolutely possible to interact with a set of a billion different individuals via social media
So you have a billion Facebook friends?
> commerce, et cetera.
So you go to a billion different grocery stores? A billion different drugstores? A billion different restaurants?
The fact that, ultimately, there might be a billion or more people involved in the processes that bring you your food, household items, etc., or visiting the same social media sites that you do, does not mean you interact with all of those people directly. Nobody does. All of that activity is coordinated spontaneously, driven by individual voluntary interactions involving much smaller numbers of people.
In fact, talking about the social media case, centralization of power, as in the case of Facebook, has arguably done more harm than good.
> let's move N down to 10,000 (a small city or large crowd). How do you manage that without hierarchical organization and government?
You will most likely have hierarchical organization in these cases. But hierarchical organization is not the same thing as government. Hierarchical organizations evolve all the time through the voluntary interactions of people. Governments impose their rules on people by force. Those are very different things.
> But hierarchical organization is not the same thing as government. Hierarchical organizations evolve all the time through the voluntary interactions of people. Governments impose their rules on people by force. Those are very different things.
The functional health of an organization is directly determined by how closely its constituents are following a loose language of agreed-upon behaviors -- protocols. If you pretend such protocols don't exist, or explicitly refuse to enforce them, your organization will simply disintegrate.
Nothing you have said here contradicts anything I said. An organization that evolves through the voluntary interactions of people can still have such protocols and people can still follow them, even though nothing is ever imposed on anyone by force. People who refuse to follow the protocols simply find that other organization members will not interact with them.
> Anarchism (and any fully decentralized protocol) "works" for small N because the average node can keep all the other nodes of the society in memory. If you need something, you know exactly whom to ask. And if you do something wrong, everyone will remember and hold you accountable. This plainly doesn't work with millions of nodes.
This can work for large N because people fill roles. If you travel today to some other place and want to buy bread, you don't need to know the name of a bread seller in that place. You look for a store that looks like it sells food and ask if they have bread. If they don't, they will probably be able to direct you to a store that does.
If you do something wrong, this can either be tracked by something you're required to keep on your person such as an ID or a tattoo, or by some commonly accessible records.
Since this is a tech site, you can think of it like interactions between objects in object-oriented programming. A billion objects can interact with each other in all sorts of ways without requiring some central manager.
As soon as you have "roles"/routers/managers, you no longer have a truly flat, decentralized network. Some nodes become these privileged "roles" and certain behaviors and information flows centralize around them; they become de facto authorities in the baking industry, for instance.
Somewhere, sometime, an true anarchist will complain about that.
People can mutually agree to relationships based on roles. Multiple groups can network with each other and make further agreements, or one group can voluntarily decide to model parts of itself after another.
I don't think most anarchists would complain about senior bakers, or senior/elder/educated people generally, sharing advice, if that's what you mean, as long as all relationships remain voluntary.
How do you define "harm"? If you shoot me in the head that's pretty clearly harmful. But what if you cut ahead of me in a queue, or let your dog poop on my lawn, or drive an unmuffled car when I'm trying to sleep, or dump just a tiny amount of lead into my drinking water?
> But what if you cut ahead of me in a queue, or let your dog poop on my lawn
You don't need laws or hierarchy for this, just social conventions and in fact we already have them and they work. Queues hold all the time and you can mostly walk around without stomping on dog shit.
> drive an unmuffled car when I'm trying to sleep, or dump just a tiny amount of lead into my drinking water?
The first is a minor annoyance that exists also under our current hierarchy, the second can be safely consired harm, as it's scientifically proven.
That's a nice little utopian fantasy which can sort of work for privileged people who live in nice safe neighborhoods. Try living in a ghetto and relying on social conventions there. Ask a local gang member politely to control his pit bull and you're likely to catch a beating, or worse.
Ghettos wouldn't exist under anarchy. They are a byproduct of capitalism. It's not like abolishing capitalism would abolish ghettos right away, but if you remove the capitalist hierarchy there are not many reasons left for minorities to marginalized.
(I think of Kushi's book "Macrobiotic Diet" as a good example of how one can see the universe in grain of sand. Half of the book is a meditation on how eating a diet appropriate to your bioregion (personal change) can change everything, even prevent nuclear war. The other half is about how Japanese people can and should eat like the people in Gintama. A person in Upstate NY who follows the same logic should eat beans, squash and corn, not seaweed.)