Correction: Anarchism avoids this problem by putting everyone in charge. It’s not an arrangement in which nobody is empowered, it is an arrangement in which everyone is empowered.
so i have trouble understanding the anarchistic society.
how do you build public works? how do you get everyone to agree to sacrifice for the public good? how do you stop the warlord from seizing control? even worse, how do you solve the tragedy of the commons? if peer pressure alone of a group becomes impossible after 50 participants, are you stuck in fractals of 50?
It’s important to understand that anarchism is a bottom-up system of governance rather than top-down. Solutions to problems are discovered procedurally and organically by a society of individuals that agree from the outset to basic, simple rules which merely allow that process to occur: Stripped down, simply mutual respect and direct communication. Therefore if you try to understand anarchism as a pre-defined system like a democratic republic, your understanding will be frustrated. There are no singular answers to the questions you pose as there is no singular anarchist system. What is important and constant is that a group agrees from the outset to behave as a cooperative community of equivalent individuals. Anarchism is emergent, rather than prescriptive. And if you do not have that mutual agreement from the outset, you cannot yet do anarchism.
A solution to the group size issue you pose is nested communes, a proven system for scaling anarchist society. It’s basically an inverted hierarchy: Hyperlocal communes of 50-100 individuals make all the final decisions right from the outset, on all matters that are destined to affect them. Then they send usually two messengers from their commune to a “higher” coordinating commune where they meet with the messengers from 25-50 other communes. These messengers are not “representatives” like in a democratic republic! They do not make new decisions. They are merely delivering their commune’s decision. It is then the job of this coordinating commune to cohere all of the delivered decisions from their constituent communes, through a number of pre-decided procedural conflict resolution methods. If there are conflicts between commune decisions that cannot be cohered and resolved through these methods, the decision can go no further and the issue gets passed back to the constituent communes to discuss again. Messengers don’t make new decisions without their home commune! The members of each commune know this, so they’re aware that sending out decisions that are bullheaded / undiplomatic / selfish / uncompromising are likely to cause a lockup and be rejected, therefore are incentivized to come to decisions that are agreeable and readily negotiable in advance. They are likely to phone up the next commune over when they make these decisions to double check that they’re on the same page, and negotiate changes to their decisions in advance. Many lines of direct communication are incentivized even before the messengers are sent to the coordinating commune. Everyone in this web is incentivized to be in dialog, or they could possibly delay getting what they want.
So, one coordinating commune can contain the regional consensus of ~5,000 people across 50 constituent communes. Once the decisions within that level 1 coordinating commune are cohered, if they also concern people outside of that 5,000 person region they can then proceed to a level 2 coordinating commune via another two messengers from the level 1! Same process as before, and 5,000 people grows to 250,000. The largest branch of governance in AANES, the Kurdish-led region of northern Syria, is a nested commune like this one (Liberal-style political parties exist in a separate, smaller branch). With roughly 4.5 million participants, they require IIRC 4 levels of this system and decisions can go from top to bottom (Or bottom to top, depending on how you see it) in a few weeks which is actually faster in many cases than a liberal congress. AANES is liberalizing and top-down structure has been formalizing out there, re-colonizing the social sphere, but last I heard most of these communes still meet daily.
Oh and as for the “tragedy of the commons”, that is a problem specific to capitalism and other hierarchical hoarding systems. If you ask an anthropologist they’ll tell you that this problem literally does not occur outside niche situations where people normalized to capitalism suddenly find themselves outside of that system having to manage resources for themselves (Like a shipwreck stranding). It simply does not occur in societies that have not been introduced and normalized into hierarchical hoarding. In fact the sheep pasturing example often used to illustrate the myth is a situation that was managed through anarchist-style mutual aid back when people really did have to communicate and cooperate with their neighbors to share a commons like grassland. Shepherds weren’t constantly in conflict with each other and running out of grass! They understood that they had to cooperate to survive! Tragedy of the commons is straight up capitalist propaganda.
Also culture, education, enlightened self interest, conscience, ego, the primal urge to act, boredom, laziness, scifi fandom…
Not everything has to be coercive.
tragedy of the commons
Created by the capitalist bullshit ownership. Not a real thing. Wasn’t a real thing for thousands of years and had to be enforced at gun point for centuries before it kicked in.
people will be evil come crunch time!
Literally the opposite of how it works. Provably: there are books on the topic.
The concept of ownership works more to inhibit industrius impulses and accomplishment than to nurture them. The threat of coercive violence fractures more than coheres social efforts. The mechanisms of that violence and their maintenance enable and necessitate a lot more violence than they stop. And they keep people from growing into fully mature adults. I dont think you genuinely outgrow childhood until you live as an outlaw or face state repression for a couple years.
But part of the beauty of this society is that everyone has a say. Nothing that you can see before it’s into the process of being made can or will be an accurate representation of it, because the collectivity of imagining it, which is so foreign to us here, is both such a huge part, and so impossible to do on your own.
ok, so there are fundamental things here i don’t agree with.
when mentioning peer pressure, i am talking about the need for acquiescence in matters which a person would otherwise not agree to. all the other methods you mention are ways to reach understanding sure, but you will have the contrarian, it’s a fact of life and i mention peer pressure as the only known way to compel without resorting to “violence” which i am using broadly. as the threat of the police can be considered a violence against citizens. plus all the same methods you mention can be the cause of the division in the first place…
we also seem to have a different understanding of the tragedy of the commons. the claim that humans, unless under the duress of the capitalist system would not exhibit these weaknesses is completely alien to human nature. even when you consider the most pure example of such society, the family. children having no real needs unmet, and even most wants satisfied, will still take every inch available, wether it’s warranted. this quirk in humans is seen before the advent of capitalism which tracks as those who did not act it were less fit then those who did. this is akin to claiming that of capitalism didn’t exist, people would not lie, chat, or steal.
i don’t remember saying people will become evil during crunch time, but i take it that is your understanding of the tragedy of the commons. i think evil may be a bit strong, but i understand the tragedy is just ‘being in the wrong’ … that the tragedy didn’t start at crunch time. the tragedy started during good and plentiful times, a but the consequences didn’t happen until crunch time. the parable has the neighbors taking more then they needed from the public trust during the good time to prepare themselves incase there would be bad times. if you were to try to convince me that people are only self serving because of capitalistic pressures, that would be an uphill battle. and to assume that all people would be the same in this matter is overgeneralizing individuals, and sadly the true tragedy is that this qirk is infectious, it only takes one. usually this is held in check via threat of societal ‘violence’.
to say that coercive violence is bad for people and society is not anything i can argue one way or the other. i could and may agree, but its purpose was never to establish a bother/sisterhood, but to change the risk calculus for taking advantage of the collective. now i am not fully defending capitalism here. it’s beyond obvious that this benefits the chosen few at the extreme detriment of the meny. that capitalism can’t last 100 years without having to be burned down and started over.
without squaring what i consider fundamental human flaws, i do not believe an anarchistic society could run beyond groups larger then that of a family, or real small village. and if that’s the goal… then great sacrifices will have to be made, no public works, no schools, no job specialization, no technology, just survival. art may survive in some limited capacity
Tragedy of the commons is more applicable to capitalism, it’s competing groups trying to get as much resourses as possible when there is limited resources.
Public works can be done on a cooperative basis, by unions of workers. The Conquest of Bread is a book that outlines how an anarchic society may function, here’s an excerpt from it about rails:
In support of our view we have already mentioned railways, and we will now return to them.
We know that Europe has a system of railways, over 175,000 miles long, and that on this network you can nowadays travel from north to south, from east to west, from Madrid to Petersburg, and from Calais to Constantinople, without delays, without even changing carriages (when you travel by express). More than that: a parcel deposited at a station will find its addressee anywhere, in Turkey or in Central Asia, without more formality needed for sending it than writing its destination on a bit of paper.
This result might have been obtained in two ways. A Napoleon, a Bismarck, or some potentate having conquered Europe, would from Paris, Berlin, or Rome, draw a railway map and regulate the hours of the trains. The Russian Tsar Nicholas I. dreamt of such a power. When he was shown rough drafts of railways between Moscow and Petersburg, he seized a ruler and drew on the map of Russia a straight line between these two capitals, saying, “Here is the plan.” And the road was built in a straight line, filling in deep ravines, building bridges of a giddy height, which had to be abandoned a few years later, after the railway had cost about 120,000 to 150,000 pounds per English mile.
This is one way, but happily things were managed differently. Railways were constructed piece by piece, the pieces were joined together, and the hundred different companies, to whom these pieces belonged, gradually came to an understanding concerning the arrival and departure of their trains, and the running of carriages on their rails, from all countries, without unloading merchandise as it passes from one network to another.
All this was done by free agreement, by exchange of letters and proposals, and by congresses at which delegates met to discuss well specified special points, and to come to an agreement about them, but not to make laws. After the congress was over, the delegates returned to their respective companies, not with a law, but with the draft of a contract to be accepted or rejected.
If capitalist rail companies can cooperate to build a rail system, rail companies owned by the workers would cooperate much more freely.
Anarchic societies actually saw production increase, since it eliminated a lot of useless jobs, In an anarchist reigon of spain, they produced so much bread and oil that after giving it away for free they were still able to export some (source). (I highly recommend you read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, its a great book).
If people were able to overthrow a government once, they can surely do it again for a warlord. If anything, it would be harder to re-establish a government since people will see their lives materially improve with anarchism.
Outside forces are a problem, but they’re a problem with capitalism as well.
But that’s how we started. How are you gonna stop the people that then gather and creates groups with leaders that ravage the land like the golden horde?
By meeting with them regularly as their neighbor and getting to know their needs through continuous dialog and figuring out how to make you and them materially reliant on one another in order to create an organic, interdependent, cooperative community in which the wants and needs of individuals become aligned.
This has literally always been the only way to dependably avoid your scenario under any system, regardless of institutional obfuscations to the contrary. Anarchism really just strips away those obfuscations and thrusts it’s participants directly into mutual power with one another.
But if we overthrow the government without offering something to take its place, what’s to stop something really nasty from filling the power vacuum?
That’s the mantra of those who are working up the nerve to be really nasty themselves. The really ruthless usually tell you that they are there to protect you from other ruthless people; often, they are telling themselves the same thing.
If we were powerful enough to overthrow one government, we would be powerful enough to prevent the ascendance of another, provided we weren’t tricked into rallying around some new authority. What should take the place of the government is not another formalized power structure, but cooperative relationships that can meet our needs while keeping new would-be rulers at bay.
From the vantage point of the present, no one can imagine creating a stateless society, though many of the problems we face will not be solved any other way. In the meantime, we can at least open spaces and times and relations outside the control of the authorities.
That entire FAQ is a hodge podge of logical fallacies; apparently written by someone who’s read lots of 20th century history books but has zero understanding of real life civics.
That’s the mantra of those who are working up the nerve to be really nasty themselves.
Calling everyone who disagrees closet-oppressors is an ad hominim not an argument.
If we were powerful enough to overthrow one government, we would be powerful enough to prevent the ascendance of another,
That’s a hasty generalization that US interventions abroad patently disproves.
not another formalized power structure, but cooperative relationships that can meet our needs while keeping new would-be rulers at bay.
That’s just reinventing the wheel. Relationships need to be formalized in order to consistently deliver at scale. Likewise power structures inherently exist because of the would-be rulers.
no one can imagine creating a stateless society, though many of the problems we face will not be solved any other way.
This is an appeal to ignorance on multiple levels.
It would be hard for a feudal peasant or lord to envision a capitalist society.
And even harder, some might say impossible, for either of us to know what someone 500 years ago was thinking or could comprehend. The argument appeals to our ignorance as evidence of it’s merit.
It’s also a terrible argument since hunter gatherer societies largely avoided conflict due to humans being so sparse. It was simply much, much, easier to move on than to fight prior to the agricultural revolution.
Meanwhile we have archeological evidence of subsistence marauders from the stone age. They found a village that lacked contemporary agriculture. It also had a mass grave of victims who had been killed violently but their deaths spanned over a decade.
Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this (granted, I’m on a phone, but still).
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great book that explores an anarchist society. It works because the anarchists are on an unwelcoming moon with very few resources.
They dissolved MAREZ, and while they still operate their community help centers, they no longer govern the area. While the whole list of reasons for this is unknown to anyone but the Counsels of Good Government, the greater issues they spoke about was a combination of the government bodies of Mexico applying more pressure, at the same time Cartel territory has expanded into their area, and the violence, and threats to the counsel that came from this.
So the Zapatistas are not in a good way at the moment.
Anarchism isn’t about pretending harm doesn’t exist either. The people that want to do real harm and will cause harm (will in bold because it’s important to distinguish people who want to do harm and people who will do harm) can just as easily get into positions of power in our current system. Most people don’t want chaos, so why should we organize society around the assumption that we need rulers to prevent it? Basic morals are very, very easy for a super majority of a society to get behind.
Bad actors will mess up any polity, to any degree. That’s not a unique fault of anarchism, my friend.
Anarchism avoids this problem by putting no one in charge
Correction: Anarchism avoids this problem by putting everyone in charge. It’s not an arrangement in which nobody is empowered, it is an arrangement in which everyone is empowered.
True, you can argue it either way.
When there’s no one in charge, everyone is in charge.
I guess making “in charge” synonymous for “an authority” squares the circle too.
so i have trouble understanding the anarchistic society.
how do you build public works? how do you get everyone to agree to sacrifice for the public good? how do you stop the warlord from seizing control? even worse, how do you solve the tragedy of the commons? if peer pressure alone of a group becomes impossible after 50 participants, are you stuck in fractals of 50?
It’s important to understand that anarchism is a bottom-up system of governance rather than top-down. Solutions to problems are discovered procedurally and organically by a society of individuals that agree from the outset to basic, simple rules which merely allow that process to occur: Stripped down, simply mutual respect and direct communication. Therefore if you try to understand anarchism as a pre-defined system like a democratic republic, your understanding will be frustrated. There are no singular answers to the questions you pose as there is no singular anarchist system. What is important and constant is that a group agrees from the outset to behave as a cooperative community of equivalent individuals. Anarchism is emergent, rather than prescriptive. And if you do not have that mutual agreement from the outset, you cannot yet do anarchism.
A solution to the group size issue you pose is nested communes, a proven system for scaling anarchist society. It’s basically an inverted hierarchy: Hyperlocal communes of 50-100 individuals make all the final decisions right from the outset, on all matters that are destined to affect them. Then they send usually two messengers from their commune to a “higher” coordinating commune where they meet with the messengers from 25-50 other communes. These messengers are not “representatives” like in a democratic republic! They do not make new decisions. They are merely delivering their commune’s decision. It is then the job of this coordinating commune to cohere all of the delivered decisions from their constituent communes, through a number of pre-decided procedural conflict resolution methods. If there are conflicts between commune decisions that cannot be cohered and resolved through these methods, the decision can go no further and the issue gets passed back to the constituent communes to discuss again. Messengers don’t make new decisions without their home commune! The members of each commune know this, so they’re aware that sending out decisions that are bullheaded / undiplomatic / selfish / uncompromising are likely to cause a lockup and be rejected, therefore are incentivized to come to decisions that are agreeable and readily negotiable in advance. They are likely to phone up the next commune over when they make these decisions to double check that they’re on the same page, and negotiate changes to their decisions in advance. Many lines of direct communication are incentivized even before the messengers are sent to the coordinating commune. Everyone in this web is incentivized to be in dialog, or they could possibly delay getting what they want.
So, one coordinating commune can contain the regional consensus of ~5,000 people across 50 constituent communes. Once the decisions within that level 1 coordinating commune are cohered, if they also concern people outside of that 5,000 person region they can then proceed to a level 2 coordinating commune via another two messengers from the level 1! Same process as before, and 5,000 people grows to 250,000. The largest branch of governance in AANES, the Kurdish-led region of northern Syria, is a nested commune like this one (Liberal-style political parties exist in a separate, smaller branch). With roughly 4.5 million participants, they require IIRC 4 levels of this system and decisions can go from top to bottom (Or bottom to top, depending on how you see it) in a few weeks which is actually faster in many cases than a liberal congress. AANES is liberalizing and top-down structure has been formalizing out there, re-colonizing the social sphere, but last I heard most of these communes still meet daily.
Oh and as for the “tragedy of the commons”, that is a problem specific to capitalism and other hierarchical hoarding systems. If you ask an anthropologist they’ll tell you that this problem literally does not occur outside niche situations where people normalized to capitalism suddenly find themselves outside of that system having to manage resources for themselves (Like a shipwreck stranding). It simply does not occur in societies that have not been introduced and normalized into hierarchical hoarding. In fact the sheep pasturing example often used to illustrate the myth is a situation that was managed through anarchist-style mutual aid back when people really did have to communicate and cooperate with their neighbors to share a commons like grassland. Shepherds weren’t constantly in conflict with each other and running out of grass! They understood that they had to cooperate to survive! Tragedy of the commons is straight up capitalist propaganda.
Also culture, education, enlightened self interest, conscience, ego, the primal urge to act, boredom, laziness, scifi fandom…
Not everything has to be coercive.
Created by the capitalist bullshit ownership. Not a real thing. Wasn’t a real thing for thousands of years and had to be enforced at gun point for centuries before it kicked in.
Literally the opposite of how it works. Provably: there are books on the topic.
The concept of ownership works more to inhibit industrius impulses and accomplishment than to nurture them. The threat of coercive violence fractures more than coheres social efforts. The mechanisms of that violence and their maintenance enable and necessitate a lot more violence than they stop. And they keep people from growing into fully mature adults. I dont think you genuinely outgrow childhood until you live as an outlaw or face state repression for a couple years.
But part of the beauty of this society is that everyone has a say. Nothing that you can see before it’s into the process of being made can or will be an accurate representation of it, because the collectivity of imagining it, which is so foreign to us here, is both such a huge part, and so impossible to do on your own.
ok, so there are fundamental things here i don’t agree with.
when mentioning peer pressure, i am talking about the need for acquiescence in matters which a person would otherwise not agree to. all the other methods you mention are ways to reach understanding sure, but you will have the contrarian, it’s a fact of life and i mention peer pressure as the only known way to compel without resorting to “violence” which i am using broadly. as the threat of the police can be considered a violence against citizens. plus all the same methods you mention can be the cause of the division in the first place…
we also seem to have a different understanding of the tragedy of the commons. the claim that humans, unless under the duress of the capitalist system would not exhibit these weaknesses is completely alien to human nature. even when you consider the most pure example of such society, the family. children having no real needs unmet, and even most wants satisfied, will still take every inch available, wether it’s warranted. this quirk in humans is seen before the advent of capitalism which tracks as those who did not act it were less fit then those who did. this is akin to claiming that of capitalism didn’t exist, people would not lie, chat, or steal.
i don’t remember saying people will become evil during crunch time, but i take it that is your understanding of the tragedy of the commons. i think evil may be a bit strong, but i understand the tragedy is just ‘being in the wrong’ … that the tragedy didn’t start at crunch time. the tragedy started during good and plentiful times, a but the consequences didn’t happen until crunch time. the parable has the neighbors taking more then they needed from the public trust during the good time to prepare themselves incase there would be bad times. if you were to try to convince me that people are only self serving because of capitalistic pressures, that would be an uphill battle. and to assume that all people would be the same in this matter is overgeneralizing individuals, and sadly the true tragedy is that this qirk is infectious, it only takes one. usually this is held in check via threat of societal ‘violence’.
to say that coercive violence is bad for people and society is not anything i can argue one way or the other. i could and may agree, but its purpose was never to establish a bother/sisterhood, but to change the risk calculus for taking advantage of the collective. now i am not fully defending capitalism here. it’s beyond obvious that this benefits the chosen few at the extreme detriment of the meny. that capitalism can’t last 100 years without having to be burned down and started over.
without squaring what i consider fundamental human flaws, i do not believe an anarchistic society could run beyond groups larger then that of a family, or real small village. and if that’s the goal… then great sacrifices will have to be made, no public works, no schools, no job specialization, no technology, just survival. art may survive in some limited capacity
Tragedy of the commons is more applicable to capitalism, it’s competing groups trying to get as much resourses as possible when there is limited resources.
Public works can be done on a cooperative basis, by unions of workers.
The Conquest of Bread is a book that outlines how an anarchic society may function, here’s an excerpt from it about rails:
If capitalist rail companies can cooperate to build a rail system, rail companies owned by the workers would cooperate much more freely.
Anarchic societies actually saw production increase, since it eliminated a lot of useless jobs, In an anarchist reigon of spain, they produced so much bread and oil that after giving it away for free they were still able to export some (source). (I highly recommend you read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, its a great book).
If people were able to overthrow a government once, they can surely do it again for a warlord. If anything, it would be harder to re-establish a government since people will see their lives materially improve with anarchism. Outside forces are a problem, but they’re a problem with capitalism as well.
But that’s how we started. How are you gonna stop the people that then gather and creates groups with leaders that ravage the land like the golden horde?
By meeting with them regularly as their neighbor and getting to know their needs through continuous dialog and figuring out how to make you and them materially reliant on one another in order to create an organic, interdependent, cooperative community in which the wants and needs of individuals become aligned.
This has literally always been the only way to dependably avoid your scenario under any system, regardless of institutional obfuscations to the contrary. Anarchism really just strips away those obfuscations and thrusts it’s participants directly into mutual power with one another.
I recommend you read this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-frequently-asked-questions-about-anarchism#toc7
More specifically,
That entire FAQ is a hodge podge of logical fallacies; apparently written by someone who’s read lots of 20th century history books but has zero understanding of real life civics.
Calling everyone who disagrees closet-oppressors is an ad hominim not an argument.
That’s a hasty generalization that US interventions abroad patently disproves.
That’s just reinventing the wheel. Relationships need to be formalized in order to consistently deliver at scale. Likewise power structures inherently exist because of the would-be rulers.
This is an appeal to ignorance on multiple levels.
Also: You are assuming that just because the text contains a fallacy, it is incorrect or worthless. That is a fallacy in itself.
Assumptions are not logical fallacies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Assuming that the text is wrong because it’s fallacious is a fallacy.
Except I didn’t just point out the fallacies. So you’re wrong.
How does it appeal to ignorance? It would be hard for a feudal peasant or lord to envision a capitalist society.
And even harder, some might say impossible, for either of us to know what someone 500 years ago was thinking or could comprehend. The argument appeals to our ignorance as evidence of it’s merit.
You should look into Capitalist Realism (people won’t read the book, so here’s the wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism#HeroSection). It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
Please understand. I can envision a path beyond capitalism. It’s the vast majority of leftists/libertarian housecats who fail to inspire confidence.
Out of interest, what is that path?
I’m not convinced. What if the government was just weak at the time
It’s also a terrible argument since hunter gatherer societies largely avoided conflict due to humans being so sparse. It was simply much, much, easier to move on than to fight prior to the agricultural revolution.
Meanwhile we have archeological evidence of subsistence marauders from the stone age. They found a village that lacked contemporary agriculture. It also had a mass grave of victims who had been killed violently but their deaths spanned over a decade.
Okay, but weapons exist. Any country that declared that it had no government would be taken over in less time than it’s taking me to type this (granted, I’m on a phone, but still).
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a great book that explores an anarchist society. It works because the anarchists are on an unwelcoming moon with very few resources.
Zapatistas seem to doing a good job.
They dissolved MAREZ, and while they still operate their community help centers, they no longer govern the area. While the whole list of reasons for this is unknown to anyone but the Counsels of Good Government, the greater issues they spoke about was a combination of the government bodies of Mexico applying more pressure, at the same time Cartel territory has expanded into their area, and the violence, and threats to the counsel that came from this.
So the Zapatistas are not in a good way at the moment.
Weapons exist for both sides :)
Anarchism isn’t about pretending harm doesn’t exist either. The people that want to do real harm and will cause harm (will in bold because it’s important to distinguish people who want to do harm and people who will do harm) can just as easily get into positions of power in our current system. Most people don’t want chaos, so why should we organize society around the assumption that we need rulers to prevent it? Basic morals are very, very easy for a super majority of a society to get behind.
Bad actors will mess up any polity, to any degree. That’s not a unique fault of anarchism, my friend.
Didn’t say it was.
Prison style.