> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.
I find this definition interesting because it seems to me there’s a very prevalent portrayal in media pointing towards the opposite, that is that humans left alone (read, without some powerful/wealthy authority) will unravel into the most depraved state imaginable.
Reading the book factuality was fascinating because it showed me a view of humans that you don’t see in mass media since ordinary is boring and thus we only get either extremes of good or bad (read, saving the Amazon rainforest to a mother killing her child)
Anarchy by this definition is hard to believe (although I aim to) because we are bombarder with the exceptions to the rule
It's impossible to generalize this without factoring in the external environment.
Put a group of mentally stable people together in a safe, hospitable community with unlimited resources and yes the theory will probably hold true.
But what happens when the food runs out? If there's a natural disaster? A plague? Some other crisis? What if they get invaded by a neighboring tribe whose intentions aren't so great?
That's the true test of anarchy, and humans have shown throughout history that they soundly fail it.
You do not have to wait for food to run out. There is always 'that one guy trying to ice skate uphill'. They test the limits on everything and do not care about others at all. It only takes one jerk to ruin a party. I know at least 4 people like this, probably more (they hide it better). They would rob you in a heartbeat if they could get away with it and even if they cant. But in general they seem nice and happy and stable. The reality is they just do not want to get caught.
Evolutionarily, you probably want those types too. An orderly tribe might get slaughtered by some unforeseen situation that they try to fight together; whereas the individualist "I don't give a shit" type might just run away - and let his genes survive. Same in situations of starvation: the DGAS types will lie and cheat to get a bit more of this and a bit more of that, ensuring the survival of their genepool - whereas the meek will probably die out.
Evolution is not a dinner party, to misquote a certain Chinese guy.
Yep first thing that happened was shitcan the kids. They knew kids had very little relative risk but the argument was it's worth them losing an education, you don't want Grandma to die do you?
I lived in Rojava and they are quite capitalist outside a few sectors. Go someplace like qamislo and it's basically capitalism with street vendors and stark disparity of wealth and poverty. However you can get free bread by simply appearing at a few stalls.
The socialist (leftwing anarchism adjacent), mustache-jesus ("apo") stuff is far more revered in the military and certain communes.
This is completely untrue though. Yes, some people are and will continue to be complete assholes who will take advantage of any kind of situation, but pretty much all evidence point towards people banding together and helping each other in times of crises.
Its corporations and billionaires and dictators being able to mobilize massive amounts of wealth and/or people that lead to terrible outcomes. So anarchists are completely correct: their tenets reduced to the simple slogan of 'no gods, no masters' is the only fundamentally correct ideology.
Something I'm coming to realize is even independent of the whole "engagement" thing, media in general (that also goes for movies, TV, video games, etc) are manipulating our brains into expecting higher highs and lower lows than most of us will regularly directly encounter in our real lives (and when I say "expect" I mean in the sense that when we don't get that, we experience that as a negative feeling of boredom rather than a positive feeling of freedom to start doing something interesting).
When you get off that diet and start interacting with people more in real life and use "boring" time as an opportunity to try new things (again in real life, offline), it feels good. Like eating fresh veggies after subsisting on fast food for so long you forgot what real food tastes like.
I'm kinda preaching this to myself since I grew up on all that stuff and am trying to maintain the awareness of this different perspective in order to improve my own mindset (I was tempted to say productivity, but raw output isn't the goal so much as using that "boredom" feeling as a trigger for exploration).
e.g. if you read anything on your local cities subreddit you will think everyone in the city is left leaning. You will think that anyone who isn't left leaning is the devil; they are pedophiles, conspiracy theorists, etc.
If you go out into the city 99.9% of the people are perfectly pleasant regardless of their political leanings.
I'm not sure that anarchism works, but what I will say is that you can't really translate the way that people behave "in captivity" into an anarchist state.
For example, I gladly would give money to fund infrastructure in my neighbourhood, I help my friends, family, my neighbourhood both financially and with time, etc. I enjoy helping out those in genuine need.
When that becomes taxation and when I end up being forced under the threat of violence to fund all sorts of stuff that I don't feel I (or anyone) should be paying for, my behaviour changes, because it no longer makes me feel good to do so.
So I end up minimizing my taxes due, earning less via income, trying to avoid paying for things like parking etc etc because it doesn't feel like a fair and equal trade.
So the vast majority of people are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. But a tiny minority of people, even in a world where we try to force "reasonable behavior," cause an unfathomable amount of suffering and destruction. If we completely give up on the idea of "forcing people to behave," you have to have a good answer about what exactly these people do in that world, and what exactly happens as a result.
You don't need many bad actors to turn an unpoliced society into fiefdoms. While you could squint a bit and believe that most people behave in a reasonable fashion, the reason is that they are conflict averse. They can be coerced to serve anyone who is willing to resort to (enough) violence.
Anarchy probably works okay in low density areas rich in natural resources resulting in low competition.
The pastoral idyll, the hunter gatherers, etc. Once you get high density, anonymity, etc. that comes with towns and cities it probably breaks down quite a bit and you need a force to keep it from imploding.
Ancient Native Americans used to have an interesting system. Most of the year they would roam around in "anarchic" groups of 100-200. During the buffalo hunting season, hundreds of nomadic tribes would come together and build a tent city with thousands of individuals. They'd elect a tribe to "police" the hunt, effectively insuring that everyone got a fair split of meat, and other animal products. There was a rule where the same tribe couldn't be elected twice, so if someone took an issue with the way order was kept, they could wait until hunting season was over and volunteer their own tribe to police next year.
True. Just saying I see it being a viable system in some instances of those circumstances, but not all, nor most. But that under those circumstances it has a viable path.
> Anarchy probably works okay in low density areas rich in natural resources resulting in low competition.
Anarchy, or anarchism?
In my private lexicon, "anarchy" is simply a state of social disorder. "Anarchism" on the other hand, is any of a number of political views that reject hierarchy, violence and masters (so anarcho-capitalism is capitalism, not anarchism). The maintenance of order in a society without using hierarchies or violence ironically requires a lot of organisation and "rules".
People have to opt-in to those rules, at least in the sense that you can live with them for now. Yes, there will always be people who reject all rules, and refuse to cooperate with others. They get shunned, which sounds awful; but nearly all anarchist societies are embedded in some hierarchical state, so opting out isn't that awful.
I have trouble imagining an anarchist society that encompasses an entire state or territory. I'm told that Iraqi Kurds have established something like that, but I have no experience of it, and don't know how it works. I've only known anarchism working in relatively small groups, with a surrounding non-anarchist society to absorb and deal with the opt-outs.
Indeed, anarchy was the default state of human nature until communities reached Dunbar's number, i.e. around 150 people. Then, they did invent civilization for a reason!
That doesn't pass the sniff test for me. The smallest possible human "community" would be a single family, and families are definitely coercive and hierarchical.
Children becoming fully independent from the authority of their parents and relatives at a certain age is a uniquely modern, American idea. Everywhere else, and throughout the rest of human history, hierarchies of age and blood relation tend to be immutable and pervasive.
This civilization meant exploitation of peasants, genocide of Native Americans, slavery, exploitation of women. It created a lot of wars and suffering. I treat anarchism as a direction to try to get nice parts of current world (scientific research, some technologies like advanced medicine) without the inequalities and suffering that was done along the way. Anarchists postulate structures, a lot of them postulate replacing current structures with federated decentralized structures utilizing various horizontal ways of making decision with the possibility to delegate someone to a task where they have certain autonomy and they can get instantly recalled if for some reason they are not adequate to the task.
Don’t kid yourself. Native Americans were just like any other peoples and warred against each other, took slaves or simply put the losers under the sword. People in any system are still people with the same tendencies. Culture can influence people up to a point. Even in strict places where you get killed for certain peccadillos people who enforce those mores are known to engage in those same peccadillos.
People might think the British were not brutal with their own people, but if you read up on the Clearances, you’d know they valued people less than sheep.
> I treat anarchism as a direction to try to get nice parts of current world (scientific research, some technologies like advanced medicine) without ...
Don't fool yourself! The niceties of modern times require a critic mass that is orders of magnitude larger than what anarchism can cope with.
People can't even manage an intersection with traffic lights without someone enforcing rules... sadly.
I live in a capital of a small chicken-shaped european country, where we have a couple of intersections where basically all life stops during rush hour. As soon as the light turns green, people rush into an already full intersections, honk at people alreday stuck there, then wave angrily at the next batch of people honking at them, when the lights change and noone has moved a bit.
Then one day, our rich and corrupt mayor had to pass there, and had to exit his car to wave at people and yell at bus drivers (city employees) stuck there too.
So, the next day (and a few weeks after), police was patrolling that intersection, literally stopping cars from entering a blocked intersection (even if their light was green), and driving there was finally managable, if you drove into a non-clogged direction, you could actually drive through. A few weeks later, no police anymore, chaos is back.
Same for parking... city streets and city police (actually two branches that can give out fines), you get fined within five minutes of parking where you shouldn't or parking and not paying. Hofer (=Aldi) parking, where noone enforces parking: https://old.reddit.com/r/Slovenia/comments/188zh49/malo_de%C... (no, these are not parking spots, but it was raining a bit, and some drivers think they'll melt if water touches them).
So yeah... a human can behave nice, people as a group? Nope.
I am willing to bet that not only does where you live have state, but plenty of it. It's like pointing at how bad the outcomes of your state are for the people and then going "see, that's why we need the state." It reads more as an indictment of the state than an indictment of anarchism.
> I find this definition interesting because it seems to me there’s a very prevalent portrayal in media pointing towards the opposite, that is that humans left alone (read, without some powerful/wealthy authority) will unravel into the most depraved state imaginable.
That's not surprising as the media, speaking generally, is a class which aligns itself closely with the ruling class and is incentivized to maintain the status quo.
Um...how many stories in the media, from the front page of the NYTimes to top-grossing movies, are about the incompetence & evils of governments & members of ruling classes?
I'm thinking that the problem is audience bias. Outside of a few little niches, running "All Is Well in Happy Valley"-type stories does not pay the bills.
> Um...how many stories in the media, from the front page of the NYTimes to top-grossing movies, are about the incompetence & evils of governments & members of ruling classes?
I don't have a copy of today's NYT so I'll leave it to someone else to perform the exercise. But it's besides the point. You're asking the wrong question. Again speaking generally, when the media criticizes the "incompetence & evils of governments" it is in effort to elevate or promote some other government party, or to promote their alternative program or policy, not to fundamentally alter the system of government itself. When they criticize a member of the ruling class it frequently is part of a coordinated PR campaign organized by another member of the ruling class.
Anyone part of the media who veers too off course the path of allowable opinion is quickly reigned in or let go.
Yep which is why I'm ancap anarchist not socialist anarchist which seems almost an oxymoron. You cannot take things from people, like means of production they've produced, and force them to share without aggression.
All anarchism stems from voluntary interactions, which depends on free trade .
Take away the state and I can self defend my capital from aggression with ak47. Under anarchism then what you going to do? Either you attack me, get someone else to attack me, or have a 'not' state do it.
Or just maybe leave me alone and agree to trade capital voluntarily. All options.
How would you defend your all 100 properties at once without a state? If by capital you mean your personal belongings, then they can easily stay with you. Anti-capitalism concerns monopoly on land, resources, machines relevant for production and intellectual property like patents. Some people don't have access to those and they have to either become slave workers or starve.
No such thing as Anarchy. I've evolved my view on politics, gangs, tribes and governments into a simple understanding that we're dealing with systems at-large and those systems will always be expanding to fill the known universe and they'll constantly be bumping into each other and competing. An "Anarchist" is someone that does not consent to an authority (system) or its self identified "social contract". Ironically these kinds of people are the ones that dream-up systems (Rousseau's ideas built the US constitution) which then attract and absorb the systems-people (conformists). I accept that these systems-people are violent (nature of systems) and predatory but inevitable and sometimes useful and will be part of humanity for as long as humanity exists. Anarchy is impossible.
This is exactly how I view anarchism. The word itself only says one thing, no leaders. So it's up to us to define a world without leaders.
My definition has always been that we can have laws, we can have rules, we definitely need rules, but everyone must have a chance to understand how they're made, and everyone must have a chance to be part of the process. The only true democracy is anarchy. If we can put a man on the moon and hold elections then surely we can construct a functional anarchist system.
If you're a true anarchist you believe more in rules than anyone else. Rules about littering, about right of way, rules that enforce order. Because without centralized leadership everyone must help enforce the rules.
Which is also why it'll never work in practice of course. It will always remain a dream, it goes against evolution, really. If evolution is throwing dice then it dictates that sooner or later someone will go against the grain. No system is perfect and sooner or later someone will exploit it.
The true nature of human politics is just pure chaos. Dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, or like Pac said; "gimme gimme gimme, everybody back off". It's like a biological survival instinct to hoard wealth and protect ones own against the world.
> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.
This is an empirical question. It seems to me that even if a good-sized majority of the population is capable of living in this fashion, a small minority is absolutely not. (And this obviously is not due to "deprivation" or "inequality", unless you believe that white collar criminals are "deprived.") A small percentage of people can quite easily ruin things for everyone else, e.g. in NYC where a third of all shoplifting arrests were for 327 people (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...).
Your friend’s daughter had her drink spiked and then was raped while passed out by a bunch of frat guys.
If you believe that you and your buddies should get together with guns and baseball bats and go to the Frat house and exact justice/revenge on them, then you might really be an anarchist.
All the situations outlined are nice and good. Self-organization should be the default mode. However, there are situations where you need someone that can use violence to enforce justice. For most people, that would be the state.
The effectiveness of the state’s enforcement is orthogonal to whether you believe it is their responsibility.
Do you believe that the state should be trying to enforce justice for rape, or do you think it should be the responsibility of a “self-organizing” posse?
If we agree that it is the state’s responsibility, then we can talk about ways to improve it. But then, you are already not an anarchist.
I don't view justice as a responsibility but rather as a right for the victim. Whether the victim stops the rape with a 9mm hole in the aggressors head, sends posse, or sends a judge to do it are private matter for the victim to choose not for me to dictate.
The problematic parts come up with how you pay the judge (stealing from 3rd parties), jailers etc and much the other stuff the state does. It would probably be more pragmatic to basically privatize the judge/court.
> I don't view justice as a responsibility but rather as a right for the victim. Whether the victim stops the rape with a 9mm hole in the aggressors head, sends posse, or sends a judge to do it are private matter for the victim to choose not for me to dictate.
So again, think of murder instead of rape. The victim isn't going to enforce a right to justice - they already failed to do so. Now what? Do you just shrug and say "you should have defended yourself better"? In that environment, can you not see how much it would absolutely suck to be a loner who is both physically and financially weak?
Worse: Can you not see that you are in fact physically, financially, and socially weak? You're going to be the prey. So think very carefully before you advocate this "utopia".
The state in this case is merely your select buddies, who also murder and rob others and especially the weak.
While I acknowledge the difficulties in justice with murder you're just arguing over which group of buddies is the bestest, and picking the biggest murderer of them all. Not seeing any improvement.
> The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how
Well, I guess I'm not an anarchist then because I think it's already difficult when there's pressure to tell people what to do.
> Now, you might object that all this is well and good as a way for small groups of people to get on with each other, but managing a city, or a country, is an entirely different matter. And of course there is something to this. Even if you decentralize society and put as much power as possible in the hands of small communities, there will still be plenty of things that need to be coordinated, from running railroads to deciding on directions for medical research. But just because something is complicated does not mean there is no way to do it democratically. It would just be complicated. In fact, anarchists have all sorts of different ideas and visions about how a complex society might manage itself. To explain them though would go far beyond the scope of a little introductory text like this. Suffice it to say, first of all, that a lot of people have spent a lot of time coming up with models for how a really democratic, healthy society might work; but second, and just as importantly, no anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.
Anarchy does not mean absence of organisation. It means absence of unfair dominance and control of one over another. An anarchist society could be highly organised, in all kinds of ways people decide to.
At least on-line, the definitions I'm seeing are very heavy on the "there are no rulers / authorities / states / government" points. There ain't no "as long as it's fair" escape clauses.
Small-scale, if well-behaved people are the vast majority, and there are easy ways to cut out the occasional bad actor - that can work very well. Just look at the Internet of the 1970's and 1980's.
Larger scale, with a real-world mix of human behaviors, and cutting off the "wrong sort" far more difficult - OOPS. Look at the modern internet, and the many toxic actors and organizations that have explosively grown in the large-scale anarchy.
EDIT: Add "no big rewards for becoming dominant" to my preconditions for anarchy working well. You for-sure could not have gotten Zuckerbucks-grade rich by dominating the early internet.
Graeber was anarchist but did work to make it palatable to liberal minded readers. Graeber doesn’t advocate for hierarchy. If you want examples of how the O of the Anarchy symbol could work and maybe did work in our human past, as organizations without hierarchy, see Dawn of Everything
The terms anarchist and libertarian are both really misunderstood (or misused?) today. At least in the US, most people seem to think libertarians are anarchists and anarchists are terrorists that want to lice in The Purge.
I guess that does kind of make sense though. We also don't use the left/right spectrum the way most other cultures do and we've totally redefined what it means to be liberal or conservative.
To me, all these "isms" have millions of different versions, almost one in each brain.
If you ask a fan of AOC (not all of them obviously), "socialism" might conjure an image of clean and tidy Stockholm, ask a fan of Trump (not all of them obviously) and they'll tell you about Stalin's gulags or how Sweden is overrun by "Muslim terrorist".
>The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how.
That's a crock of shit, look at how brutal early civilizations were compared to today. You have an argument over long terms (100+ year spans), but not in the near term.
If you want the assumption to apply to the near term, you have to accept that people behave in part based on the laws and society which they grew up with, which then makes you look weird for being against that system. That's what gives rise to the common decency.
Compared to today? In the past century hundreds of millions of people have been slaughtered by states. Compare that with any "private sector" killing, now or in "early civilization" and the mounds of bodies are non-existent by comparison.
> That's a crock of shit, look at how brutal early civilizations were compared to today. You have an argument over long terms (100+ year spans), but not in the near term.
That's why I suppose anarchism as an ideology was born in the 19th century. You don't have to make it work through all of humankind history, just in the modern times. I say this and I'm not even an anarchist myself.
Most civilizations created hierarchy, there are examples of somewhat anarchistic cities and civilizations that were very egalitarian and free, we can get inspiration from the to try to create a different world.
Anarcho-X people are heavily misrepresented by the government.
If north america went anarcho-capitalist, it'd work as well as or better the current system.
But the problem is that there's still an entity which must enforce property rights, etc. This 'police/military force' then becomes the new government. It will ever increase in size. Eventually you arrive back to where we are.
Where government got so large that it's unsustainable, suddenly anarchist sentiments return.
Another question: do you consider yourself neither left nor right on the political spectrum, because you believe that society is fundamentally broken and both sides just further consumerism in different ways (the right supports big business directly, and the left tries to create equal opportunities for everyone to further consumerism)?
>do you consider yourself neither left nor right on the political spectrum, because you believe that society is fundamentally broken and both sides just further consumerism in different ways (the right supports big business directly, and the left tries to create equal opportunities for everyone to further consumerism)
No, because I find that extremely reductionist, simplistic and naive. In my experience points of view that abandon nuance in favor of equivocation and cynicism tend themselves to be attempts at propaganda and control.
It is true, if you adopt the left/right political model (which you don't even need to, it is itself a propaganda tool meant to normalize the two party paradigm in American politics) that both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US serve the needs of capitalism and the military industrial complex. It is not, however, true that all leftist ideology and all right-wing ideology are essentially the same as a result, and that neither have any purpose or value beyond simply being vehicles for capitalism.
"Far-left" is a derogatory term, a synonym for "left-wing extremist". Nobody considers themselves an extremist. I've noticed that my own views seem to be to the left of any mainstream political party here. For me, that just means that all the mainstream parties are right-wing.
I reserve the term "far-left" for hyper-dogmatic communist revolutionaries who don't object to using violence for political ends.
It appears that you want to use the term "far left" to mean something like "socialist". I agree that anarchists are socialists.
I don't agree that all Marxist-Leninists are authoritarian; and for what it's worth, I'm not aware of any Marxist-Leninist grassroots group operating here (UK).
I repeat: "far-left" is a term of abuse. It's routinely deployed by US persons of the Trumpian and Tea-Party persuasions against anyone they disagree with, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, a party that has never espoused any kind of socialism.
> I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no.
> A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that person or whether you really live in that room.
> The conclusion that I came to is that essentially, the left is applying an outdated paradigm: they’re still thinking in terms of bosses and workers in a kind of old-fashioned industrial sense, when what’s really going on is that for most people the key class opposition is caregivers versus managers. Leftist parties are trying to represent both sides at the same time, but they’re really dominated by the latter.
> Because, in a way, the left began against bureaucratization of life. It’s about freedom. The mainstream left, which is barely left at all at this point in traditional terms … has really embraced a combination of market and bureaucracy, an equal synthesis of the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of bureaucracy.
well, they wouldn't be left wing if they presented centrist liberal ideals would they? you, too, may be confusing liberalism with leftism. almost as if it was the intended function of the liberal project...
"Left" is a relative concept. The original French revolution left was liberalist. Liberalism is the core ideology of the current western world. Both Democrats and Republicans are liberalists. Even Putin is predominantly a liberalist.
Liberalism is totally OK with authoritarian autocrats as long as they maintain the "freedom" of property holders to do as they please regardless of societal outcomes. Liberalism has a more problematic relationship with democracy. Quite expected as most people suffer from the liberalist economical order, making it somewhat tricky to maintain democratically.
yes, this is what i am saying. modern liberalism is indeed a "core ideology", or put another way, a hegemonic centrist ideal. it is definitionally not leftist. i think it is well understood that most leftist political ideologies recognize the importance of a liberal movement as a precursor. to the original comment this stems from, leftism is in no way an endorsement of consumerism.
I find it more useful to use more "absolute" terms. If by left you mean some fashion of socialism, then indeed left is not liberalist. But in contemporary politics such left is almost non-existant. E.g. most European "socialist" or even "communist" parties are staunchly liberal, and mostly celebrate consumerism.
I don't think "leftism" is really an ideology, or at least it can mean very different things in different contexts.
Edit: I find it also better to use "liberalist" instead of "liberal" when referring to the political movement and ideology. "Liberal" is easy to misinterpret and misuse, and it tends to hide the fact that liberalism a quite specific ideology, that e.g. has no monopoly on liberty.
I find this definition interesting because it seems to me there’s a very prevalent portrayal in media pointing towards the opposite, that is that humans left alone (read, without some powerful/wealthy authority) will unravel into the most depraved state imaginable.
Reading the book factuality was fascinating because it showed me a view of humans that you don’t see in mass media since ordinary is boring and thus we only get either extremes of good or bad (read, saving the Amazon rainforest to a mother killing her child)
Anarchy by this definition is hard to believe (although I aim to) because we are bombarder with the exceptions to the rule