Depends on the anarchist. Many would focus on seeking the absence of involuntary power hierarchies. A manager who distributes work and does performance evaluations isn’t intrinsically a problem, it’s when people doing the work can’t say “no, they’re a terrible manager and they’re gone”, or you can’t walk away from the job without risking your well-being.
Anarchists and communists/socialists have a lot of overlap. There’s also overlap with libertarians, except libertarians often focus on coercion from the government and don’t give much regard to economic coercion. An anarchist will often not see much difference between “do this or I hit you” and “do this or starve”: they both are coercive power hierarchies.
Some anarchists are more focused on removing sources of coercion. Others are more focused on creating relief from it. The “tear it down” crowd are more visible, but you see anarchists in the mutual aid and community organization crowds as well.
Anarchism is not the thing you’re told about in the media. It isn’t a total lack of all government. It’s a removal of hierarchical systems and exploitation. There still needs to be systems to protect people from these. They’d just be done through concensus.
Classes, as per Marx, are foremost identified by the economical position of people, and not necessary a hierarchy as such, that’s a secondary effect of how classes happen to work towards their own self-interest. If, in an anarchist utopia, one population freely chooses to live in a high-tech skyscraper doing engineering work, and another neighbouring one grows coffee in the rain forest, then their economical position is vastly different and they have different interests, thus they are different classes, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be nasty to another.
Most importantly though this is all just arguing semantics and Marx didn’t get anarchism anyway, mixing the theoretical bodies is usually more headache than it’s worth.
Yes, because anarchism is against all hierarchies and the class system is a form of hierarchy. Instead, decisions should me made collectively, for example in councils open for everyone
@lugal@danc4498 Anarchism is against specifically unjust hierarchies, it can permit certain ones to exist within individual communities should the community find it justified, but still strongly favours not having any where possible.
There are a group of anarchists who would still believe in the idea of an adult > child hierarchy as they struggle to imagine an alternative world without it.
Parents have natural bootmaker authority and if you want to be a good parent then you realise that the kids also have it: They, or maybe better put their genome, know how they need to be raised, and try to teach you, as well as (with increasing age) seek out the exact bootmakers that seem sensible. Worst thing you can do as a parent is to think that learning is a one-way street.
Isn’t anarchy just against imposed hierarchy? Most anarchists I’ve met are okay with heirarchies that form naturally, and believe those hierarchies to be enough for society to function, hence why they call themselves anarchists, not minarchists.
I have never heard the term minarchist. Many anarchists say, we need structures against the building of hierarchies, like avoiding knowledge hierarchies by doing skillshares.
Natural authorities are a different topic. I think Kropotkin was an example of a leader who was accepted because everyone agreed with him. Once he said something people didn’t like, they rejected him as a leader. You can call this a hierarchy if you like. I wouldn’t because he couldn’t coerce his followers but this is pure terminology.
So, do the anarchists not think that capitalism will just prevail and bring along with it the classes of the haves and have nots? Anarchy won’t solve the problem of wealth inequality, will it? I have genuinely never understood this aspect of anarchism.
Anarchism is opposition to power hierarchies, specifically non-consensual or coercive ones. Wealth inequality without safety networks is a coercive power hierarchy, and so needs to be fought. Capitalism as a whole is almost always incompatible with anarchy, at least in the way we tend to do it now. In a system with strong social safety networks the choice to work for someone can actually be a choice, and so some schools of thought would view it as compatible.
Others view exclusive ownership of property as someone asserting power over someone else’s ability to use said property, and therefore wrong. Needless to say, abolition of private property is not compatible with capitalism.
Under direct democracy (or even representative democracy but with more levels in between) it would be at people’s disposal to try and ultimately solve anything…
The system where someone monopolizes a essential good and leverages that to gain power is called anarcho-capitalism and is a whole different thing.
In anarchy, ownership on that level does not exist. Neither a company nor a person can own a factory, or a farm, or the power grid. Employment doesn’t exist. People can band together and distribute tasks for a common goal (such as producing a certain good) but they all hold equal stake in all decisions.
Of course a group of people could use violence to oppress other people. But then you no longer have anarchy. The same way a democracy stops beeing a democracy once a group seizes power and doesn’t allow fair elections anymore.
Neither a company nor a person can own a factory, or a farm, or the power grid
And who is going to stop a company from owning a factory or a farm? It wouldn’t even require violence for a company to do so. It just requires them to have enough resources to pay people to do it.
I guess I don’t see what you call “anarchy” as a system that would ever exist more than a year. The end result would always be “anarcho-capitalism”. That, or, people would have to form their own government to prevent that system.
The company would need violence. There’s no reason for workers to work in a factory for less money than their goods are sold for, and there’s no reason for the company to pay workers more than the goods are sold for. Without violence the workers could just produce and sell the goods themselves and ignore the company.
Yeah, that’s what I mean, the workers could go in the factory, produce the goods, and sell them, if the company did not use violence. It’s not clear where the factory came from in this hypothetical. The community could’ve built it, it could have been abandoned, or the company could’ve claimed they “owned” it (which is not possible in the society, so it would be seized).
Is this a society without computers and other modern day electronics? Or do you think workers will be able to handle developing technology on their own?
Well, it’s unlikely the entire world will turn anarchist all at once, and the modern supply chain is global, so the anarchist community would trade for what they need from outside the community. Or they may choose to go anarcho-primitivism I guess. I think some remote indigenous tribes we have now could be considered anarcho-primitivist. The most successful anarcho-socialist community would probably be the Zapatistas.
Of course a group of people could use violence to oppress other people. But then you no longer have anarchy.
The irony is that the amount of coordination needed to protect anarchism would no longer be called anarchism
You will always end up recreating some form of organizations to manage resources. The best you can do is ensure those organizations are structured with accountability to make sure they’re fair to everybody
The irony is that the amount of coordination needed to protect anarchism would no longer be called anarchism
This is a common misunderstanding. While there are anti organisationist anarchists, others dream of a world while spanning confederation based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. Anarchism in general isn’t the absence of organization but the absence of hierarchy and domination (therefore isn’t anticapitalist in nature)
It is anticapitalist by nature in that capitalism is a system where a person can own the means of production and use that ownership to acquire profits. That ownership is a form of domination and creates an arbitrary hierarchy, who makes all the decisions: the owner, why do they make all the decisons: because they had the wealth to buy the company.
You can have organization and markets though without capitalism, such as with anarcho-syndaclism. Basically you have a bunch of coops that are run and controlled by elected workers councils that can trade with each other voluntarily.
That’s more or less where anarcho-syndaclism goes. Get all the workers into unions who take over their companies and turn them into co-ops. Then the co-ops collaborate and you don’t need the state or anything else.
Let’s take the most “conservative” form of anarchism: anarchosyndicalism. Every factory is organized in councils, confederated both with the import or mining council and the consumer council. Now a capitalist comes and asks how much this factory costs. Do you think the council will tell them a price or to fuck off?
Well, I don’t think a capitalist will call themselves a capitalist. I think they will have allies that get themselves appointed to the council and before we know it the factory is doing the bidding of the capitalists.
And yes, I am incredibly cynical (I blame the last 25 years), so I get that a less cynical perspective exists where this wouldn’t happen.
The council isn’t elected. It’s open for everyone to join in all decisions. It might delegate some tasks, even smaller decisions, but it can always recall them.
So in your scenario, the council would delegate the power to sell the factory to a group of people which is very unlikely. Now this group of people who are trusted by everyone would decide to sell the factory which might happen. But the council would most certainly recall them from this decision making power the never should have given away in the first place.
Maybe I should have stressed more that a council is really open for everyone to join. It’s not an elected parliament or something
I gotcha. It just feels to me like there are so many opportunities for the capitalists to abuse this system for their own profit and power. People are easily manipulated, even when they think what they’re doing is for the good of the community.
Maybe the factory doesn’t sell, but it could still very much feed the capitalists through manipulation of the members of the council. My cynical view: It may not be immediate, but it will be inevitable.
Hoarding resources will be banned. If you start doing it, we’ll beat you up before you can get enough to hire a private army. Also, only the most corrupt people would go work as a private soldier, because everyone’s needs are met so there’s no poverty to drive people to do bad things. You’d have to promise private security a lot of money to betray their nation for basically no reason.
So this anarchy is a self contained commune where nobody is allowed in that doesn’t agree with the rules. And if somebody breaks the rules, they must leave. This sums it up? It can’t apply to a country because that would never work. But to a small village, sure.
Also, hopefully the people outside the village don’t find ways of fucking with them (such as redirecting waterways that affect the downstream village).
There is a huge difference between how things should work and how they will though. Without any system of enforcement, I would call it nothing but wishful thinking.
Interesting idea for sure. I’m not sure it would work though. The concept has lots of cultural implications as well. In traditional monarchies the king is usually divinely ordained, chosen by god. A democracy doesn’t get its legitimacy from above, the people are the ultimate sovereign and legitimize the system. New Monarchy also needs some kind of higher philosophical justification.
Political systems often have a short slogan, that emphasizes their values.
The linked concept of New Monarchy doesn’t have a king. It contains asymmetric votes between classes, which is an interesting idea to keep a check on the aristocracy. I don’t think the system is fully viable as a concept, but it makes a good point at the beginning. If we get an elite ruling class anyway in every system, let’s make it more visible and directly accountable.
Your proposal is just an idealistic version of early US. You claim that corruption is fundamentally impossible, but assume that magically “the monarchs aren’t allowed to own property” without regard to enforcement. You claim to have an alternative to democracy but still propose majority voting on replacing rulers and constitutions. You simply assume that monarchs will keep each other in check and not devolve into the conspiring, warmongering tyrants that history is full of.
Power can always be abused to get more power and go against all your original ideals. The only way to definitely prevent corruption is to ensure power is never concentrated in the hands of few.
Your proposal is just an idealistic version of early US.
Thanks, I guess :)
You claim that corruption is fundamentally impossible, but assume that magically “the monarchs aren’t allowed to own property” without regard to enforcement.
I make no such claim, and I don’t make assumptions regarding enforcement either. Constitutional enforcement is discussed in quite some detail.
You claim to have an alternative to democracy but still propose majority voting on replacing rulers and constitutions.
There is majority voting on deposal of rulers, to be specific. Their replacement isn’t voted on by a majority of the population.
Constitutional changes are voted on through majority, but first require a majority of the monarchs to be on board.
Both these limitations are intentionally designed to mitigate manipulation of the population.
You simply assume that monarchs will keep each other in check and not devolve into the conspiring, warmongering tyrants that history is full of.
There is quite some detail about the enforcement mechanisms. The idea is very much not to assume, but to persuade the monarchs to act in a benevolent manner, by enticement through both the carrot (wealth for as long as they rule), but also the stick (deposal if the majority doesn’t vote in favour of their actions, with a threat of assassination if they refuse to be deposed).
Power can always be abused to get more power and go against all your original ideals. The only way to definitely prevent corruption is to ensure power is never concentrated in the hands of few.
Ah. So it wasn’t me that claimed that corruption is fundamentally impossible, it’s you that claim to have the definitive answer.
For what it’s worth, I agree power shouldn’t be concentrated in the few. Which is why I split power across districts, and between citizens and monarchs, and why the group of monarchs for each district cannot be too small either. It’s all there if you could try to be a little less dismissive.
Why wouldn’t the monarchs cooperate with each other to increase their power? Why do you think they’d keep each other in check instead? I think it’s quite plain to see that those with power would rather work together to fuck us, to their own benefit, rather than work with us against each other.
How would you reach consensus between hundreds of millions of people?
Look, I am sympathetic to the cause behind anarchism but it doesn’t work because it insists on ignoring biological realities. We need to look no further than our ape cousins to see how some hierarchical structure is inherent to our society. Only through the existence of a state can we reduce hierarchy and increase equality.
A stateless society wouldn’t last 10 minutes before establishing a state.
Ape hierarchies, at least within the troops, are mostly about mating not resource distribution. It’s not like the alpha male gets first pick of the fruit and all the other chimps wait until he’s done and then go in hierarchical order, they just disperse and grab what they can.
If you want to go down an essentialist path most pre-agricultural societies were anarchic. There may be a chief but they “ruled” at the discretion of the tribe. The chief, or anyone really, couldn’t hoard resources because
they couldnt monopolize violence and coerce people since there’s no specialization in anything much less violence so violence becomes a numbers game.
There’s only so much you can carry. Pre agricultural tribes were nomadic mostly and when the tribe moves camps you have to carry everything with you. So even if you were able to hoard enough food that won’t rot you won’t be able to carry it to the next camp.
Because of the above, wealth isn’t really a thing. This forces cooperation because without wealth, the individual can’t protect themselves from hardship. Selfish individualism only works if you’re able to build up some wealth to act as a buffer for leaner times. If you don’t have that wealth then you’re reliant on your social connections so you tend to cooperate and redistribute because it’s in your best interest to stay in good standing with the group so they will help you in harsher times.
All this changes with agriculture and the invention of wealth, first in grain then in gold and then stocks etc. Now your dependence on society is directly porportional to how much wealth you have, to the point where really rich people can fuck off to a cabin or island and never work or contribute to society ever again.
Violence specialization also becomes more or less a thing, increasing up until the invention of firearms at which point it becomes more of a numbers game and the hierarchies lessen.
All of this is to say that hierarchy is not natural, but the result of the ability to accumulate wealth combined with violence specialization and monopolization. If we get rid of those two concepts then anarchy may take over, how we do that in the modern world is another question.
I have a theory about us returning to our natural state as our end game, but I haven’t put it down to paper yet. That being said, for now, it’s either all the good things industrialization has brought (along with the bad of course) or we return to the short brutish lives we lived before agriculture.
Anarchy at this point has no real way of being implemented without another state forming the moment we decide we can do better than die short tragic lives.
It’s not one big council but a confederation of councils. I like the idea of fractal democracy. Like a huge river branching into smaller ones and when you zoom in, these smaller ones branch again and again. You have councils on many levels, each making decisions, delegating to the next level and being recallable from below.
If might makes right a state will end up forming anyways. A populist commune is still a state. Anarchy is not possible in any sense of what one might describe as a functional society. As soon as there’s a society a state will form.
But that’s also not how chimpanzee society works anyways, since mostly it’s an alpha challenged by a younger stronger chimp who takes their place and makes sure everyone else follows the rules. They even have something like a police force.
It’s a government, but it isn’t necessarily a state. Regardless, Anarchists aren’t against all forms of government. The media’s version of total chaos is not what Anarchists are trying to create.
I agree with you in that we cannot have a society without some form of state, but I think the idea is that we would have small community governments with more or less direct democracy.
Also, bio-essentialism? Really?
I guess you can call it that but as I understand it bio-essentialism denies that society has any roles at all in shaping the individual. For me there’s obvious environmental pressures that force us to act a certain way in order to survive which in turn shapes us as individuals and our societies. Of course I’m talking back to the very first human societies, but all modern societies by necessity must trace their origins there. But at a certain point we started to add rules that are based on idealized humanity, divinity, which is in my view inherently hostile to human nature.
We are animals and we have no real way to discern instinct from rational. For all you know every “rational” thought you’ve ever had is actually just an instinct. How would you be able to tell that it isn’t? But that’s neither here nor there, my point is we need to form societies that are sympathetic to our biological realities, instead of societies formed on moral values sourced from anti-human religions or idealized human religions. We would be much much happier.
I know people don’t like these type of stances because they are sometimes used to exclude trans people, or to justify racism but that’s just using science to arrive at the wrong conclusions.
They define anarchy differently from the common definition. Anarchists believe in creating community organizations to serve the needs of society, but they refrain from calling it a state because they believe a state requires a monopoly on the acceptable use of violence.
They don’t think that we should just dissolve society and let everyone fend for themselves to eliminate class, unless they’re an edgy teenager.
This is very well put. Thank you! I feel this way as well.
Everyone wants to immediately dogpile and go “OkAy SmArT gUy/GaL HoW wOuLd ThAt SoLvE eVeRyThiNg iMmEDiAtELy ToMmOrRoW huuuh?”
(As if what we’ve got now was just hatched up by some folks in its current form and implemented overnight lol)
I find myself an anarchist, but I’m also rational in seeing it more as an ideal to strive toward, rather than a concrete policy to implement overnight.
If we’re heading towards a mutually cooperative society without unjust “I wear the hat so I make the rules” hierarchies, whether or not we reach it in a utopian sense, I think we’re still moving in the right direction.
That’s functionally the difference between Anarchism, a fundamentally Individualist and Idealist ideology, and Marxism, which is fundamentally Collectivist and Scientific.
A Marxist political society will also tend towards Classlessness and Statelessness, though in the case of Marxism both of these are not goals but an inevitable result of a society dominated by the Proletariat according to Marxist theory.
Do anarchists think anarchy will result in a system with no classes?
Depends on the anarchist. Many would focus on seeking the absence of involuntary power hierarchies. A manager who distributes work and does performance evaluations isn’t intrinsically a problem, it’s when people doing the work can’t say “no, they’re a terrible manager and they’re gone”, or you can’t walk away from the job without risking your well-being.
Anarchists and communists/socialists have a lot of overlap. There’s also overlap with libertarians, except libertarians often focus on coercion from the government and don’t give much regard to economic coercion. An anarchist will often not see much difference between “do this or I hit you” and “do this or starve”: they both are coercive power hierarchies.
Some anarchists are more focused on removing sources of coercion. Others are more focused on creating relief from it. The “tear it down” crowd are more visible, but you see anarchists in the mutual aid and community organization crowds as well.
Anarchism is not the thing you’re told about in the media. It isn’t a total lack of all government. It’s a removal of hierarchical systems and exploitation. There still needs to be systems to protect people from these. They’d just be done through concensus.
This page has more information if you want to learn. https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionA.html#seca1
Anarchy means “without hierarchy”. Classes are a hierarchy, so by definition it wouldn’t be anarchy if you don’t dissolve class.
Classes, as per Marx, are foremost identified by the economical position of people, and not necessary a hierarchy as such, that’s a secondary effect of how classes happen to work towards their own self-interest. If, in an anarchist utopia, one population freely chooses to live in a high-tech skyscraper doing engineering work, and another neighbouring one grows coffee in the rain forest, then their economical position is vastly different and they have different interests, thus they are different classes, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be nasty to another.
Most importantly though this is all just arguing semantics and Marx didn’t get anarchism anyway, mixing the theoretical bodies is usually more headache than it’s worth.
Yes, because anarchism is against all hierarchies and the class system is a form of hierarchy. Instead, decisions should me made collectively, for example in councils open for everyone
@lugal @danc4498 Anarchism is against specifically unjust hierarchies, it can permit certain ones to exist within individual communities should the community find it justified, but still strongly favours not having any where possible.
There are a group of anarchists who would still believe in the idea of an adult > child hierarchy as they struggle to imagine an alternative world without it.
Parents have natural bootmaker authority and if you want to be a good parent then you realise that the kids also have it: They, or maybe better put their genome, know how they need to be raised, and try to teach you, as well as (with increasing age) seek out the exact bootmakers that seem sensible. Worst thing you can do as a parent is to think that learning is a one-way street.
Isn’t anarchy just against imposed hierarchy? Most anarchists I’ve met are okay with heirarchies that form naturally, and believe those hierarchies to be enough for society to function, hence why they call themselves anarchists, not minarchists.
I have never heard the term minarchist. Many anarchists say, we need structures against the building of hierarchies, like avoiding knowledge hierarchies by doing skillshares.
Natural authorities are a different topic. I think Kropotkin was an example of a leader who was accepted because everyone agreed with him. Once he said something people didn’t like, they rejected him as a leader. You can call this a hierarchy if you like. I wouldn’t because he couldn’t coerce his followers but this is pure terminology.
So, do the anarchists not think that capitalism will just prevail and bring along with it the classes of the haves and have nots? Anarchy won’t solve the problem of wealth inequality, will it? I have genuinely never understood this aspect of anarchism.
Anarchism is opposition to power hierarchies, specifically non-consensual or coercive ones. Wealth inequality without safety networks is a coercive power hierarchy, and so needs to be fought. Capitalism as a whole is almost always incompatible with anarchy, at least in the way we tend to do it now. In a system with strong social safety networks the choice to work for someone can actually be a choice, and so some schools of thought would view it as compatible.
Others view exclusive ownership of property as someone asserting power over someone else’s ability to use said property, and therefore wrong. Needless to say, abolition of private property is not compatible with capitalism.
Under direct democracy (or even representative democracy but with more levels in between) it would be at people’s disposal to try and ultimately solve anything…
The system where someone monopolizes a essential good and leverages that to gain power is called anarcho-capitalism and is a whole different thing. In anarchy, ownership on that level does not exist. Neither a company nor a person can own a factory, or a farm, or the power grid. Employment doesn’t exist. People can band together and distribute tasks for a common goal (such as producing a certain good) but they all hold equal stake in all decisions.
Of course a group of people could use violence to oppress other people. But then you no longer have anarchy. The same way a democracy stops beeing a democracy once a group seizes power and doesn’t allow fair elections anymore.
And who is going to stop a company from owning a factory or a farm? It wouldn’t even require violence for a company to do so. It just requires them to have enough resources to pay people to do it.
I guess I don’t see what you call “anarchy” as a system that would ever exist more than a year. The end result would always be “anarcho-capitalism”. That, or, people would have to form their own government to prevent that system.
The company would need violence. There’s no reason for workers to work in a factory for less money than their goods are sold for, and there’s no reason for the company to pay workers more than the goods are sold for. Without violence the workers could just produce and sell the goods themselves and ignore the company.
The factory helps make the goods though
Yeah, that’s what I mean, the workers could go in the factory, produce the goods, and sell them, if the company did not use violence. It’s not clear where the factory came from in this hypothetical. The community could’ve built it, it could have been abandoned, or the company could’ve claimed they “owned” it (which is not possible in the society, so it would be seized).
Is this a society without computers and other modern day electronics? Or do you think workers will be able to handle developing technology on their own?
Well, it’s unlikely the entire world will turn anarchist all at once, and the modern supply chain is global, so the anarchist community would trade for what they need from outside the community. Or they may choose to go anarcho-primitivism I guess. I think some remote indigenous tribes we have now could be considered anarcho-primitivist. The most successful anarcho-socialist community would probably be the Zapatistas.
The community. With hockey sticks.
The irony is that the amount of coordination needed to protect anarchism would no longer be called anarchism
You will always end up recreating some form of organizations to manage resources. The best you can do is ensure those organizations are structured with accountability to make sure they’re fair to everybody
This is a common misunderstanding. While there are anti organisationist anarchists, others dream of a world while spanning confederation based on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid. Anarchism in general isn’t the absence of organization but the absence of hierarchy and domination (therefore isn’t anticapitalist in nature)
It is anticapitalist by nature in that capitalism is a system where a person can own the means of production and use that ownership to acquire profits. That ownership is a form of domination and creates an arbitrary hierarchy, who makes all the decisions: the owner, why do they make all the decisons: because they had the wealth to buy the company.
You can have organization and markets though without capitalism, such as with anarcho-syndaclism. Basically you have a bunch of coops that are run and controlled by elected workers councils that can trade with each other voluntarily.
True, that’s also a form of anarchism
That’s more or less where anarcho-syndaclism goes. Get all the workers into unions who take over their companies and turn them into co-ops. Then the co-ops collaborate and you don’t need the state or anything else.
Anarchism is anti capitalist in nature since capitalism entails hierarchies
I just don’t understand how people think an anarchy can protect itself from capitalism.
By teaching history, including how capitalism killed millions of people, whole eco systems and uncountabe species.
Let’s take the most “conservative” form of anarchism: anarchosyndicalism. Every factory is organized in councils, confederated both with the import or mining council and the consumer council. Now a capitalist comes and asks how much this factory costs. Do you think the council will tell them a price or to fuck off?
Well, I don’t think a capitalist will call themselves a capitalist. I think they will have allies that get themselves appointed to the council and before we know it the factory is doing the bidding of the capitalists.
And yes, I am incredibly cynical (I blame the last 25 years), so I get that a less cynical perspective exists where this wouldn’t happen.
The council isn’t elected. It’s open for everyone to join in all decisions. It might delegate some tasks, even smaller decisions, but it can always recall them.
So in your scenario, the council would delegate the power to sell the factory to a group of people which is very unlikely. Now this group of people who are trusted by everyone would decide to sell the factory which might happen. But the council would most certainly recall them from this decision making power the never should have given away in the first place.
Maybe I should have stressed more that a council is really open for everyone to join. It’s not an elected parliament or something
I gotcha. It just feels to me like there are so many opportunities for the capitalists to abuse this system for their own profit and power. People are easily manipulated, even when they think what they’re doing is for the good of the community.
Maybe the factory doesn’t sell, but it could still very much feed the capitalists through manipulation of the members of the council. My cynical view: It may not be immediate, but it will be inevitable.
Guns, tanks, bombs, drones, mostly.
🎵What’s in your heeEeaad, in your hEeeaAad, zombie, zombie, zombeh eh-eh-eh-eh-eyyyaaahhh…🎵
We’re gonna beat up the capitalists
You don’t think the capitalists would have the resources to defend themselves?
Hoarding resources will be banned. If you start doing it, we’ll beat you up before you can get enough to hire a private army. Also, only the most corrupt people would go work as a private soldier, because everyone’s needs are met so there’s no poverty to drive people to do bad things. You’d have to promise private security a lot of money to betray their nation for basically no reason.
So this anarchy is a self contained commune where nobody is allowed in that doesn’t agree with the rules. And if somebody breaks the rules, they must leave. This sums it up? It can’t apply to a country because that would never work. But to a small village, sure.
Also, hopefully the people outside the village don’t find ways of fucking with them (such as redirecting waterways that affect the downstream village).
There is a huge difference between how things should work and how they will though. Without any system of enforcement, I would call it nothing but wishful thinking.
In fairness, democracy was a kind of wishful thinking too, which is why I would propose a new form of monarchy instead: https://arendjr.nl/blog/2025/02/new-monarchy/
No kings. No gods*.
*“gods” here referring to use of organized religion to coerce others.
Interesting idea for sure. I’m not sure it would work though. The concept has lots of cultural implications as well. In traditional monarchies the king is usually divinely ordained, chosen by god. A democracy doesn’t get its legitimacy from above, the people are the ultimate sovereign and legitimize the system. New Monarchy also needs some kind of higher philosophical justification.
Political systems often have a short slogan, that emphasizes their values.
New Monarchism could use one as well.
Kings are bad
The linked concept of New Monarchy doesn’t have a king. It contains asymmetric votes between classes, which is an interesting idea to keep a check on the aristocracy. I don’t think the system is fully viable as a concept, but it makes a good point at the beginning. If we get an elite ruling class anyway in every system, let’s make it more visible and directly accountable.
:D
From your other responses I can see you’re being sarcastic, but yeah, seems that many won’t read any further after seeing the word monarchy :shrug:
Your proposal is just an idealistic version of early US. You claim that corruption is fundamentally impossible, but assume that magically “the monarchs aren’t allowed to own property” without regard to enforcement. You claim to have an alternative to democracy but still propose majority voting on replacing rulers and constitutions. You simply assume that monarchs will keep each other in check and not devolve into the conspiring, warmongering tyrants that history is full of.
Power can always be abused to get more power and go against all your original ideals. The only way to definitely prevent corruption is to ensure power is never concentrated in the hands of few.
Thanks, I guess :)
I make no such claim, and I don’t make assumptions regarding enforcement either. Constitutional enforcement is discussed in quite some detail.
There is majority voting on deposal of rulers, to be specific. Their replacement isn’t voted on by a majority of the population.
Constitutional changes are voted on through majority, but first require a majority of the monarchs to be on board.
Both these limitations are intentionally designed to mitigate manipulation of the population.
There is quite some detail about the enforcement mechanisms. The idea is very much not to assume, but to persuade the monarchs to act in a benevolent manner, by enticement through both the carrot (wealth for as long as they rule), but also the stick (deposal if the majority doesn’t vote in favour of their actions, with a threat of assassination if they refuse to be deposed).
Ah. So it wasn’t me that claimed that corruption is fundamentally impossible, it’s you that claim to have the definitive answer.
For what it’s worth, I agree power shouldn’t be concentrated in the few. Which is why I split power across districts, and between citizens and monarchs, and why the group of monarchs for each district cannot be too small either. It’s all there if you could try to be a little less dismissive.
Why wouldn’t the monarchs cooperate with each other to increase their power? Why do you think they’d keep each other in check instead? I think it’s quite plain to see that those with power would rather work together to fuck us, to their own benefit, rather than work with us against each other.
That fact that you think “idealistic version of early US” is a compliment is very telling.
Pray tell, what does it tell?
How would you reach consensus between hundreds of millions of people?
Look, I am sympathetic to the cause behind anarchism but it doesn’t work because it insists on ignoring biological realities. We need to look no further than our ape cousins to see how some hierarchical structure is inherent to our society. Only through the existence of a state can we reduce hierarchy and increase equality.
A stateless society wouldn’t last 10 minutes before establishing a state.
Ape hierarchies, at least within the troops, are mostly about mating not resource distribution. It’s not like the alpha male gets first pick of the fruit and all the other chimps wait until he’s done and then go in hierarchical order, they just disperse and grab what they can.
If you want to go down an essentialist path most pre-agricultural societies were anarchic. There may be a chief but they “ruled” at the discretion of the tribe. The chief, or anyone really, couldn’t hoard resources because
they couldnt monopolize violence and coerce people since there’s no specialization in anything much less violence so violence becomes a numbers game.
There’s only so much you can carry. Pre agricultural tribes were nomadic mostly and when the tribe moves camps you have to carry everything with you. So even if you were able to hoard enough food that won’t rot you won’t be able to carry it to the next camp.
Because of the above, wealth isn’t really a thing. This forces cooperation because without wealth, the individual can’t protect themselves from hardship. Selfish individualism only works if you’re able to build up some wealth to act as a buffer for leaner times. If you don’t have that wealth then you’re reliant on your social connections so you tend to cooperate and redistribute because it’s in your best interest to stay in good standing with the group so they will help you in harsher times.
All this changes with agriculture and the invention of wealth, first in grain then in gold and then stocks etc. Now your dependence on society is directly porportional to how much wealth you have, to the point where really rich people can fuck off to a cabin or island and never work or contribute to society ever again.
Violence specialization also becomes more or less a thing, increasing up until the invention of firearms at which point it becomes more of a numbers game and the hierarchies lessen.
All of this is to say that hierarchy is not natural, but the result of the ability to accumulate wealth combined with violence specialization and monopolization. If we get rid of those two concepts then anarchy may take over, how we do that in the modern world is another question.
I have a theory about us returning to our natural state as our end game, but I haven’t put it down to paper yet. That being said, for now, it’s either all the good things industrialization has brought (along with the bad of course) or we return to the short brutish lives we lived before agriculture.
Anarchy at this point has no real way of being implemented without another state forming the moment we decide we can do better than die short tragic lives.
It’s not one big council but a confederation of councils. I like the idea of fractal democracy. Like a huge river branching into smaller ones and when you zoom in, these smaller ones branch again and again. You have councils on many levels, each making decisions, delegating to the next level and being recallable from below.
That just sounds like nothing will ever get done, but it would be worth simulating. Maybe it is good, who knows.
When a monkey hoards all the bananas, the other monkeys kill him and share the bananas. Anarchy is natural.
If might makes right a state will end up forming anyways. A populist commune is still a state. Anarchy is not possible in any sense of what one might describe as a functional society. As soon as there’s a society a state will form.
But that’s also not how chimpanzee society works anyways, since mostly it’s an alpha challenged by a younger stronger chimp who takes their place and makes sure everyone else follows the rules. They even have something like a police force.
It’s a government, but it isn’t necessarily a state. Regardless, Anarchists aren’t against all forms of government. The media’s version of total chaos is not what Anarchists are trying to create.
Here’s some more information if you want it: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionA.html#seca1
I agree with you in that we cannot have a society without some form of state, but I think the idea is that we would have small community governments with more or less direct democracy. Also, bio-essentialism? Really?
I guess you can call it that but as I understand it bio-essentialism denies that society has any roles at all in shaping the individual. For me there’s obvious environmental pressures that force us to act a certain way in order to survive which in turn shapes us as individuals and our societies. Of course I’m talking back to the very first human societies, but all modern societies by necessity must trace their origins there. But at a certain point we started to add rules that are based on idealized humanity, divinity, which is in my view inherently hostile to human nature.
We are animals and we have no real way to discern instinct from rational. For all you know every “rational” thought you’ve ever had is actually just an instinct. How would you be able to tell that it isn’t? But that’s neither here nor there, my point is we need to form societies that are sympathetic to our biological realities, instead of societies formed on moral values sourced from anti-human religions or idealized human religions. We would be much much happier.
I know people don’t like these type of stances because they are sometimes used to exclude trans people, or to justify racism but that’s just using science to arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Yeah, I can agree to that.
They define anarchy differently from the common definition. Anarchists believe in creating community organizations to serve the needs of society, but they refrain from calling it a state because they believe a state requires a monopoly on the acceptable use of violence.
They don’t think that we should just dissolve society and let everyone fend for themselves to eliminate class, unless they’re an edgy teenager.
This is very well put. Thank you! I feel this way as well.
Everyone wants to immediately dogpile and go “OkAy SmArT gUy/GaL HoW wOuLd ThAt SoLvE eVeRyThiNg iMmEDiAtELy ToMmOrRoW huuuh?”
(As if what we’ve got now was just hatched up by some folks in its current form and implemented overnight lol)
I find myself an anarchist, but I’m also rational in seeing it more as an ideal to strive toward, rather than a concrete policy to implement overnight.
If we’re heading towards a mutually cooperative society without unjust “I wear the hat so I make the rules” hierarchies, whether or not we reach it in a utopian sense, I think we’re still moving in the right direction.
It’s actually right in the name. Anarchy from an-arkhos means “without ruler”. They think hierarchies are illegitimate per se.
That’s functionally the difference between Anarchism, a fundamentally Individualist and Idealist ideology, and Marxism, which is fundamentally Collectivist and Scientific.
A Marxist political society will also tend towards Classlessness and Statelessness, though in the case of Marxism both of these are not goals but an inevitable result of a society dominated by the Proletariat according to Marxist theory.
Ah yes. That’s why after the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin stepped in and dissolved the state.