Well I mean murdering someone breaks the very definition of libertarianism so you can be very sure they’re just using that moniker because it fits whatever they’re really trying to accomplish.
the maximum freedom for each individual to follow his own ways, his own values, as long as he doesn’t interfere with anybody else who’s doing the same.
they’re just using that moniker because it fits whatever they’re really trying to accomplish.
That’s what Libertarianism is. The same naming con also applies to the so-called Green Party. I don’t know why we are so easily fooled by names of things, especially when we live in a country full of scams where people constantly try to fool you like this. You’d think we’d develop a tolerance considering it’s a constant thing, but nope, we’re still just as stupid and naive as we were decades ago. If anything, we’ve gotten more naive.
Words have meanings and definitions if I call myself a pacifist who is against violence but I go around punching people in the face. Are you going to change the definition of pacifist or are you going to call me a violent non-pacifist.
If they’re not following the actual principles of libertarianism then call them what they truly are. Reactionaries, conservatives, trolls, etc
Are you going to change the definition of pacifist or are you going to call me a violent non-pacifist.
If you and all of the other pacifist movement people are really violent then I’d say the same thing about your movement, you’re running a naming scam.
In this particular case, it’s difficult to even call libertarianism a set thing, because the “movement” spends much of its time discussing what is and isn’t libertarianism, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that individual liberty versus collective responsibility is largely a more difficult balance to strike than they’re pretending, and there’s no clear and fast way to cut it for every scenario. Pacifism, on the other hand, is much more straightforward to define.
If whoever you’re talking to is openly engaging in behavior that encourages breaking of the nap, then yeah you’re dealing with a non-libertarian. To put this in other terms, all the Christian denominations believe in Jesus. They believe different things about Jesus, but they all believe in this guy named Jesus. If some guy starts preaching about Bob the true Messiah and calling himself a Christian everybody’s going to be very confused why he’s calling himself a Christian.
Read the linked article, look at that verbiage: “considered by some”. That’s exactly my point. Nobody has the ability to define what exactly libertarianism is in this country because there are so many little feuding factions, and it’s a 1-5% movement in the first place.
It’s essentially a thing you can pretend to be when the Republican candidate is too repulsive to openly support and that’s about it.
The major libertarian party in the United States is the Libertarian Party. However, libertarians are also represented within the Democratic and Republican parties while others are independent. Gallup found that voters who identify as libertarians ranged from 17 to 23% of the American electorate.
Libertarianism includes anarchist and libertarian socialist tendencies, although they are not as widespread as in other countries. Murray Bookchin,[25] a libertarian within this socialist tradition, argued that anarchists, libertarian socialists and the left should reclaim libertarian as a term, suggesting these other self-declared libertarians to rename themselves propertarians instead.[26][27] Although all libertarians oppose government intervention, there is a division between those anarchist or socialist libertarians as well as anarcho-capitalists such as Rothbard and David D. Friedman who adhere to the anti-state position, viewing the state as an unnecessary evil; minarchists such as Nozick who recognize the necessary need for a minimal state, often referred to as a night-watchman state;[28] and classical liberals who support a minimized small government[29][30][31] and a major reversal of the welfare state.[32]
Personally i’m pretty much center on the left right spectrum and firmly minarchist.
If you have to type fifteen responses complete with diagrams about your ideology, then everything I’m saying about it not being straightforwardly definable is 100% correct and you’re proving it right now.
Gallup found that voters who identify as libertarians ranged from 17 to 23% of the American electorate.
Exactly, “identify as”…do you really think 17-23% of the American voting populace actually has consistent, definable meanings about what it means to be a libertarian? I’m willing to bet that they do not. Relatedly, I have never seen the Libertarian Party get 17-23% of the vote in my lifetime. So, sure, you have a bunch of people that “identify” as libertarian (as I once did in college despite always voting Democrat) but in reality, they are not part of the organized party at all. The Libertarian Party gets up to the low single digits in national elections which is a pathetic showing and is why they do not even get to debate the candidates of the two main parties.
They show up every couple of election cycles, take their “conscientious objector to the ‘duopoly’” single digit voter percentage, cause spoiler effects, and then fuck off back into the wilderness.
American politics is akin to the aisles in the grocery stores here: lots and lots of different labels and colorful packaging, and very little actual choice.
It becomes its own thing. Like if you hear the word “truther” out of context you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that it refers to someone who takes the truth very seriously. But in the context if a “9/11 truther” it means the opposite: someone who is completely dissociated from reality.
When a movement adopts a word as its name, it’s like the word splits in two: one with the original meaning and one which refers to the group and means whatever that group stands for. Which one becomes dominant basically depends on what version the mainstream media uses more often. It’s a zeitgeist thing.
There was a far right wing takeover about 10 years ago. The party’s mostly dead now. Conservative solid as a strong contender to grow into a replacement for the Republican party and swing the US political system back towards center. So they pumped massive amounts of funding into the ancap communities and have massively infiltrated the party with Russian propaganda and garbage above like the post.
Earlier than that actually, by another 10 years, in an event called the Portland Massacre by opponents of changes which dropped the elements of the Dallas Accord. That’d when the takeover occurred, though the takeover began about 10 years before that.
So its effectively been a total shit show for about 30 years by my estimates.
Let’s cut to the chase. The Republican party was embarrassed by Nixon resigning to avoid impeachment and have spent the last 50 years doing whatever they can to get revenge and prevent it from happening again. That process has led them to becoming ultra conservative as a way to make it so that laws don’t apply to them.
Interesting. I was personally referring to my experiences with Reddit 10 years ago. And the violent pendulum swing I observed happening there when the mods of all the large libertarian groups got replaced all discussion was silenced. All nuance was removed and the marching orders were given and I turned my back on that place.
Around the time of KIA, the NRA getting money from Russia, the change in T_D from laughing at trump t9 being full maga, the changes to r/conspiracy, etc?
Yeah I think that was the specific influence of a certain former superpower that has spent a few years fighting a few days worth of war, but that’s my bit of conspiracy theory. Its just too coincidental (with too many known incidents) for me not to believe its all related.
Oh I know what definitonal Libertarianism is, but like you said, their rank and file typically reduce that to mean Rules for Thee but Not for Me. And subsequently that typically falls to white males upholding their privileges.
Modern “libertarianism” has been fully corrupted by both corporations (to mean “liberty from any and all government regulations”) and by the racist shithole fascists (to mean “my liberty to commit hate crimes and no liberty for everyone else”). It sucks because I mostly agree with the tagline, but people like Friedman are far too altruistic about how well corporations can operate without some level of government oversight to keep them actually accountable to the individuals that libertarianism is supposed to uphold.
Oh boy do I have some great news for you! That’s what anarchism is all about. Right wing “libertarians” stole the word from anarchists way back when. There’s a deep political and intellectual tradition spanning two centuries exploring and philosophizing what it means to have order without authority and how to construct a society without government. I’d be happy to leave some reading/watching/listening material for you if you’d like to see what real libertarianism is about
I am not the guy you responded to but I am interested.
Because in my ignorant head, the big problem with anarchy (I use the word broadly to mean “a lack of government” mostly because I don’t know any better) is: what’s stopping an ill-intentioned mob from making itself a de facto government little by little through coercion when people can’t resort to a system that concentrates and organizes the otherwise sparse powers of society that want to uphold the state of anarchy? It’s like you’d need a government to ensure that there’s no government, which is clearly absurd.
Edit: just wanted to throw in anarchy in a nutshell is order without authority. That’s what the circle A symbolizes!
There’s a few ways you could take that. I’m reading your comment as a more structural concern over something like disorganized street violence so that’s how I’ll be approaching this. I’m also a social anarchist (pro organization), there are individualist anarchists (broadly anti organization) who may have a different perspective.
Anarchists don’t advocate for only abolishing structural hierarchies. We also labor to build horizontal organizations to serve as opposition and an eventual replacement of these hierarchies. This is called prefiguration, often described as “building the new in the shell of the old”. To oppose mob violence and territorial domination, these structures may take the form of neighborhood councils, community defense forces, or larger federated iterations of these bodies.
The thing that distinguishes these organizations from their hierarchical counterparts (municipal councils and police respectively) is the distribution and flow of power. These bodies are organized in a horizontal fashion; where the power flows from the bottom up. The people living in a given area might convene at regular intervals to coordinate efforts that are relevant to them. For example, a neighborhood council may organize a community defense force, composed of members in the community. The council would determine the scope of responsibilities for the defense force, allocate resources and equipment, and hash out other administrative contingencies.
Positions of “power” within these bodies and organizations would be confined to delegates, who are given explicit tasks to accomplish, are immediately revocable by the community at any time, and who’s position would be dissolved upon completion of their task. In addition, it’s common to have these delegations to be assigned by rotation (think jury duty, in a sense) to community members.
This isn’t everything, of course. But I hope that gave you a rough idea of how these structures would be capable of combatting violence within a community. Bodies like these form a “government” of sorts to manage an area. I didn’t mention it above but its worth pointing out that these organizations are voluntary. Anarchy is all about creating a world without coercion. It’s been demonstrated time and again that people want to be involved in their communities, they want to help shape the world in a meaningful way and these structures simply provide a means for individuals to do their part in the ways they’re capable and willing to do so.
All of these structures could be scaled up as well through federation, where communities coordinate on mutual goals for the betterment of each other. We know these and similar organizational forms are viable because they’ve been done before and are being done to this day. The CNT-FAI, Zapatistas, and Rojava are examples.
The CNT-FAI were a Spanish anarcho-symdicalist organization that controlled much of Spain during the Spanish revolution. They were successfully combatting the fascist forces within Spain until the USSR betrayed them. It’s a long and interesting story that my few sentences are absolutely not doing justice lol.
If you’d like to learn how the Zapatistas and Rojava function, I’ve linked a few videos that go into some detail on their history and social structure. There aren’t many resources like that for the CNT-FAI, unfortunately.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this comment, and for being so nice about it too. In this polarized political climate, it’s quite refreshing to find someone who holds “extreme” views and who is still willing to educate rather than butt heads.
Can I ask a follow-up question? Reading your comment an immediate concern that came up was with complacency. The system you described seems to rely very heavily on nobody being an idiot (in the original Greek sense of the word, someone who isn’t interested in matters of the city-state) but in reality, a lot of people are. What if a few generations into an anarcho-syndicalist utopia, a group of people decide to elect a representative in a broad sense, informally of course, because they trust him and it’s easier this way and they can focus on other things? And then another group likes the idea, and another, and these representatives end up scheming amongst themselves…
I think where I’m going is that the structure doesn’t seem rigid. That can be a very good thing for several reasons, but it can also be bad in that it seems (again, to my uninformed self) to not be very resilient against erosion.
I hope you’ll notice that I am absolutely on board with the abolishment of impositional hierarchies. Both concerns I’ve expressed have to do with how the system would stay alive rather than with what it sets out to accomplish.
Thanks again for taking time out of your Sunday to educate a total stranger.
I’m always happy to ramble on about anarchism! Thanks engaging me with an open mind. My “extreme” views aren’t always met with a great reaction haha
Your follow up gets into a lot of deep theory from several different areas, but it’s a great question! I’ll do my best to answer it concisely but please know that I won’t be able to answer it perfectly; dozens of books have been written on each aspect of the breakdown I’ll be following this bit up with. If you’re interested in diving deep into these areas, the YouTube channel I linked in my last comment primarily does video essays. His largest project is titled “A Modern Anarchism” and it’s a synthesis work, bringing several strains of anarchism together to form a coherent framework for the present. I think you would find it very interesting. Some other notable creators in the theory and praxis space of anarchism are Andrewism and Zoe Baker. Shout-out to The Anarchist Library as well!
The way I read your question touches on a few areas. Hierarchical realism and self determination, complex systems and decentralization, and the cyclical nature of human history.
On hierarchical realism and self determination:
Like capitalist realism, many anarchists view society at large to be in a state of hierarchical realism - that is- dominant hierarchies are so ingrained into our collective conscience that the majority of people are incapable of imagining a world post-hierarchy. That isn’t a dig, it takes a long time of focused work to deconstruct all of the inherent biases our upbringing imbues us with. As such, any imagining of an anarchist society by people in a hierarchical society will inevitably be tainted by those biases, and will therefore be unable to perfectly depict an anarchist utopia. (Doesn’t mean people haven’t tried, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed does a fair job that addresses your question to boot). To a degree, your question can never truly be answered. It is very much a question worth asking though.
Hierarchical realism not only taints our imagination towards the future. It taints our imagination for how we might oppose domination in the present. Hierarchy, primarily capitalism and the state in this instance, has stripped us of our self determination, the means and ability to manage our own affairs. From mending clothes to managing society, most of us are incapable of truly controlling our lives and are consequently reliant on the current systems of power for our very existence. Anarchists encourage people to reclaim their self determination because it’s vital to a thriving, citizen managed, society.
I’m sure you’ve noticed a trend in society that points toward a broad delegation of tasks that are vital to modern life. Meal delivery services, hardware that’s increasingly difficult to repair, the hyper-specialization of intellectual labor, broad individual isolation from community, public schooling that is geared to make good workers instead of an educated and capable population, representative democracy. Much of it stems from a systemic pressure to atomize human function and interaction that strips us of our self determination. Anarchists believe that reclaiming ou self determination not only empowers the individual, but creates an empowered society. A society organized without coercion, geared to ensure the individual is capable and supported to manage their life and interests, is one with people who know that allowing individuals to wield systemic power to control the collective is an idea worth rejecting.
On complex systems and decentralization:
Complex systems (as they apply to social structures) in a nutshell: society functions like a living organism. The status quo seeks to exist indefinitely and either resists harmful pressures or co-opts them in order to persist.
You are correct in saying that the power structures that anarchists propose isn’t rigid, it’s not supposed to be! The Anarchist approach to freedom and power is intentionally fluid, in part to allow the individual the maximal amount of freedom and self determination, as well as to entrench a system of collective power that is capable of changing and adapting to the ever changing needs of the community. In contrast, hierarchy is incredibly rigid. It is slow to change and slow to adapt,
A decentralized society is also more resilient in the face of disaster. Think of it in terms of cells, but not too hard lol. It isn’t a great analogy. A decentralized society would be best represented by a cellular culture. If one cell- hell, 90% of cells- die, the culture may still be able to recover and regrow. By nature of its complex organization, cells.dying doesn’t necessarily mean death of the culture. The remaining cells can adapt to the endogenous or exogenous pressures that lead to cell death in the first place and come out stronger than before. In this analogy, hierarchy would be considered a single cell. If the surrounding environment becomes inhospitable to the cell, or the cell develops some horrible mutation in one of its organelles, the cell dies. That’s the end of the cell and something else that is either capable of dealing with the environment or isn’t terminally mutated will take its place.
You recognized this in your comment and I can’t do it justice so I’ll stop there on complex systems but I hope I painted a decent picture. See this video for a much better explanation.
On the cyclical nature of human history:
Hierarchy isnt new, and neither are horizontal societies. Human history is a tapestry of these social forms existing in parallel, with one being more prevelant than the other at times. Most of our written history has occurred in some form of hierarchical society, but the majority of human history points toward a largely horizontal structure. I won’t call these structures anarchic, but they do speak to the horizontal impulses present in the overwhelming majority of humans.
The way I, and many anarchists, see it, people have cooperative and competitive impulses. A horizontal social structure reinforces our cooperative drive, while a hierarchical social structure reinforces our competitive drive. Human history as we currently understand it seems to bear this truth out. The late anthropologist David Graeber has said that human history seems to operate on a roughly 500 year cycle; where different social forms emerge, replace their predecessor, grow in strength and area, and are eventually replaced by other emergent forms. This isn’t necessarily saying hierarchical forms are replaced by horizontal forms. Feudalism was replaced by capitalism after all. It’s simply pointing out that social organizations seem to have an expiration date. Capitalism emerged in the 16th century, it may be well on its way to replacement. Anarchists want to replace it with something as close to anarchy as we can imagine. In 500 years anarchy may go down on the path you described. With people slowly reinventing hierarchical forms that were abolished well beyond living memory. It might also be replaced by something more horizontal and equitable than we can imagine. A post-anarchy, if you will.
I hope that these errant threads were able to answer your question. I wanted to add some more thoughts here to kind of tie them all together but I’m coming up short. This reply wasn’t as direct as my last one, but the resources I’ve peppered throughout my comment may be able to satisfy that if I missed the mark here.
Feel free to ask any more questions you might have too! I’m happy to have a go at them
Yes, you did answer my questiom very well especially with the part about cyclical history. I will watch the resources you linked to in both comments. Again, I am very thankful tbat you took the time to answer me so thoroughly.
After I’ve done some studying, would you mind if I maybe DM’d you?
So the only reason they deleted it was because they were forced to, got it. Fucking Libertarians, the vanguard of fascism.
Well I mean murdering someone breaks the very definition of libertarianism so you can be very sure they’re just using that moniker because it fits whatever they’re really trying to accomplish.
https://www.hoover.org/research/take-it-limits-milton-friedman-libertarianism
But you’re absolutely right that a lot of people who are today clearly cheering for fascists used to call themselves libertarians.
That’s what Libertarianism is. The same naming con also applies to the so-called Green Party. I don’t know why we are so easily fooled by names of things, especially when we live in a country full of scams where people constantly try to fool you like this. You’d think we’d develop a tolerance considering it’s a constant thing, but nope, we’re still just as stupid and naive as we were decades ago. If anything, we’ve gotten more naive.
Words have meanings and definitions if I call myself a pacifist who is against violence but I go around punching people in the face. Are you going to change the definition of pacifist or are you going to call me a violent non-pacifist.
If they’re not following the actual principles of libertarianism then call them what they truly are. Reactionaries, conservatives, trolls, etc
If you and all of the other pacifist movement people are really violent then I’d say the same thing about your movement, you’re running a naming scam.
In this particular case, it’s difficult to even call libertarianism a set thing, because the “movement” spends much of its time discussing what is and isn’t libertarianism, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that individual liberty versus collective responsibility is largely a more difficult balance to strike than they’re pretending, and there’s no clear and fast way to cut it for every scenario. Pacifism, on the other hand, is much more straightforward to define.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle
If whoever you’re talking to is openly engaging in behavior that encourages breaking of the nap, then yeah you’re dealing with a non-libertarian. To put this in other terms, all the Christian denominations believe in Jesus. They believe different things about Jesus, but they all believe in this guy named Jesus. If some guy starts preaching about Bob the true Messiah and calling himself a Christian everybody’s going to be very confused why he’s calling himself a Christian.
Read the linked article, look at that verbiage: “considered by some”. That’s exactly my point. Nobody has the ability to define what exactly libertarianism is in this country because there are so many little feuding factions, and it’s a 1-5% movement in the first place.
It’s essentially a thing you can pretend to be when the Republican candidate is too repulsive to openly support and that’s about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_in_the_United_States
The major libertarian party in the United States is the Libertarian Party. However, libertarians are also represented within the Democratic and Republican parties while others are independent. Gallup found that voters who identify as libertarians ranged from 17 to 23% of the American electorate.
Libertarianism includes anarchist and libertarian socialist tendencies, although they are not as widespread as in other countries. Murray Bookchin,[25] a libertarian within this socialist tradition, argued that anarchists, libertarian socialists and the left should reclaim libertarian as a term, suggesting these other self-declared libertarians to rename themselves propertarians instead.[26][27] Although all libertarians oppose government intervention, there is a division between those anarchist or socialist libertarians as well as anarcho-capitalists such as Rothbard and David D. Friedman who adhere to the anti-state position, viewing the state as an unnecessary evil; minarchists such as Nozick who recognize the necessary need for a minimal state, often referred to as a night-watchman state;[28] and classical liberals who support a minimized small government[29][30][31] and a major reversal of the welfare state.[32]
Personally i’m pretty much center on the left right spectrum and firmly minarchist.
If you have to type fifteen responses complete with diagrams about your ideology, then everything I’m saying about it not being straightforwardly definable is 100% correct and you’re proving it right now.
Exactly, “identify as”…do you really think 17-23% of the American voting populace actually has consistent, definable meanings about what it means to be a libertarian? I’m willing to bet that they do not. Relatedly, I have never seen the Libertarian Party get 17-23% of the vote in my lifetime. So, sure, you have a bunch of people that “identify” as libertarian (as I once did in college despite always voting Democrat) but in reality, they are not part of the organized party at all. The Libertarian Party gets up to the low single digits in national elections which is a pathetic showing and is why they do not even get to debate the candidates of the two main parties.
They show up every couple of election cycles, take their “conscientious objector to the ‘duopoly’” single digit voter percentage, cause spoiler effects, and then fuck off back into the wilderness.
American politics is akin to the aisles in the grocery stores here: lots and lots of different labels and colorful packaging, and very little actual choice.
It becomes its own thing. Like if you hear the word “truther” out of context you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that it refers to someone who takes the truth very seriously. But in the context if a “9/11 truther” it means the opposite: someone who is completely dissociated from reality.
When a movement adopts a word as its name, it’s like the word splits in two: one with the original meaning and one which refers to the group and means whatever that group stands for. Which one becomes dominant basically depends on what version the mainstream media uses more often. It’s a zeitgeist thing.
There was a far right wing takeover about 10 years ago. The party’s mostly dead now. Conservative solid as a strong contender to grow into a replacement for the Republican party and swing the US political system back towards center. So they pumped massive amounts of funding into the ancap communities and have massively infiltrated the party with Russian propaganda and garbage above like the post.
Earlier than that actually, by another 10 years, in an event called the Portland Massacre by opponents of changes which dropped the elements of the Dallas Accord. That’d when the takeover occurred, though the takeover began about 10 years before that.
So its effectively been a total shit show for about 30 years by my estimates.
Let’s cut to the chase. The Republican party was embarrassed by Nixon resigning to avoid impeachment and have spent the last 50 years doing whatever they can to get revenge and prevent it from happening again. That process has led them to becoming ultra conservative as a way to make it so that laws don’t apply to them.
Interesting. I was personally referring to my experiences with Reddit 10 years ago. And the violent pendulum swing I observed happening there when the mods of all the large libertarian groups got replaced all discussion was silenced. All nuance was removed and the marching orders were given and I turned my back on that place.
Around the time of KIA, the NRA getting money from Russia, the change in T_D from laughing at trump t9 being full maga, the changes to r/conspiracy, etc?
Yeah I think that was the specific influence of a certain former superpower that has spent a few years fighting a few days worth of war, but that’s my bit of conspiracy theory. Its just too coincidental (with too many known incidents) for me not to believe its all related.
Oh, I’m certain you’ve heard of the dead internet theory. I believe in a modified version of it
I’d say it’s starting to happen here too. Not as bad but it is starting.
Yeah, there have definitely been, we’ll call them “prominent posters” here who fit the bill.
Oh I know what definitonal Libertarianism is, but like you said, their rank and file typically reduce that to mean Rules for Thee but Not for Me. And subsequently that typically falls to white males upholding their privileges.
Modern “libertarianism” has been fully corrupted by both corporations (to mean “liberty from any and all government regulations”) and by the racist shithole fascists (to mean “my liberty to commit hate crimes and no liberty for everyone else”). It sucks because I mostly agree with the tagline, but people like Friedman are far too altruistic about how well corporations can operate without some level of government oversight to keep them actually accountable to the individuals that libertarianism is supposed to uphold.
Oh boy do I have some great news for you! That’s what anarchism is all about. Right wing “libertarians” stole the word from anarchists way back when. There’s a deep political and intellectual tradition spanning two centuries exploring and philosophizing what it means to have order without authority and how to construct a society without government. I’d be happy to leave some reading/watching/listening material for you if you’d like to see what real libertarianism is about
I am not the guy you responded to but I am interested.
Because in my ignorant head, the big problem with anarchy (I use the word broadly to mean “a lack of government” mostly because I don’t know any better) is: what’s stopping an ill-intentioned mob from making itself a de facto government little by little through coercion when people can’t resort to a system that concentrates and organizes the otherwise sparse powers of society that want to uphold the state of anarchy? It’s like you’d need a government to ensure that there’s no government, which is clearly absurd.
Edit: just wanted to throw in anarchy in a nutshell is order without authority. That’s what the circle A symbolizes!
There’s a few ways you could take that. I’m reading your comment as a more structural concern over something like disorganized street violence so that’s how I’ll be approaching this. I’m also a social anarchist (pro organization), there are individualist anarchists (broadly anti organization) who may have a different perspective.
Anarchists don’t advocate for only abolishing structural hierarchies. We also labor to build horizontal organizations to serve as opposition and an eventual replacement of these hierarchies. This is called prefiguration, often described as “building the new in the shell of the old”. To oppose mob violence and territorial domination, these structures may take the form of neighborhood councils, community defense forces, or larger federated iterations of these bodies.
The thing that distinguishes these organizations from their hierarchical counterparts (municipal councils and police respectively) is the distribution and flow of power. These bodies are organized in a horizontal fashion; where the power flows from the bottom up. The people living in a given area might convene at regular intervals to coordinate efforts that are relevant to them. For example, a neighborhood council may organize a community defense force, composed of members in the community. The council would determine the scope of responsibilities for the defense force, allocate resources and equipment, and hash out other administrative contingencies.
Positions of “power” within these bodies and organizations would be confined to delegates, who are given explicit tasks to accomplish, are immediately revocable by the community at any time, and who’s position would be dissolved upon completion of their task. In addition, it’s common to have these delegations to be assigned by rotation (think jury duty, in a sense) to community members.
This isn’t everything, of course. But I hope that gave you a rough idea of how these structures would be capable of combatting violence within a community. Bodies like these form a “government” of sorts to manage an area. I didn’t mention it above but its worth pointing out that these organizations are voluntary. Anarchy is all about creating a world without coercion. It’s been demonstrated time and again that people want to be involved in their communities, they want to help shape the world in a meaningful way and these structures simply provide a means for individuals to do their part in the ways they’re capable and willing to do so.
All of these structures could be scaled up as well through federation, where communities coordinate on mutual goals for the betterment of each other. We know these and similar organizational forms are viable because they’ve been done before and are being done to this day. The CNT-FAI, Zapatistas, and Rojava are examples.
The CNT-FAI were a Spanish anarcho-symdicalist organization that controlled much of Spain during the Spanish revolution. They were successfully combatting the fascist forces within Spain until the USSR betrayed them. It’s a long and interesting story that my few sentences are absolutely not doing justice lol.
If you’d like to learn how the Zapatistas and Rojava function, I’ve linked a few videos that go into some detail on their history and social structure. There aren’t many resources like that for the CNT-FAI, unfortunately.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this comment, and for being so nice about it too. In this polarized political climate, it’s quite refreshing to find someone who holds “extreme” views and who is still willing to educate rather than butt heads.
Can I ask a follow-up question? Reading your comment an immediate concern that came up was with complacency. The system you described seems to rely very heavily on nobody being an idiot (in the original Greek sense of the word, someone who isn’t interested in matters of the city-state) but in reality, a lot of people are. What if a few generations into an anarcho-syndicalist utopia, a group of people decide to elect a representative in a broad sense, informally of course, because they trust him and it’s easier this way and they can focus on other things? And then another group likes the idea, and another, and these representatives end up scheming amongst themselves…
I think where I’m going is that the structure doesn’t seem rigid. That can be a very good thing for several reasons, but it can also be bad in that it seems (again, to my uninformed self) to not be very resilient against erosion.
I hope you’ll notice that I am absolutely on board with the abolishment of impositional hierarchies. Both concerns I’ve expressed have to do with how the system would stay alive rather than with what it sets out to accomplish.
Thanks again for taking time out of your Sunday to educate a total stranger.
I’m always happy to ramble on about anarchism! Thanks engaging me with an open mind. My “extreme” views aren’t always met with a great reaction haha
Your follow up gets into a lot of deep theory from several different areas, but it’s a great question! I’ll do my best to answer it concisely but please know that I won’t be able to answer it perfectly; dozens of books have been written on each aspect of the breakdown I’ll be following this bit up with. If you’re interested in diving deep into these areas, the YouTube channel I linked in my last comment primarily does video essays. His largest project is titled “A Modern Anarchism” and it’s a synthesis work, bringing several strains of anarchism together to form a coherent framework for the present. I think you would find it very interesting. Some other notable creators in the theory and praxis space of anarchism are Andrewism and Zoe Baker. Shout-out to The Anarchist Library as well!
The way I read your question touches on a few areas. Hierarchical realism and self determination, complex systems and decentralization, and the cyclical nature of human history.
On hierarchical realism and self determination:
Like capitalist realism, many anarchists view society at large to be in a state of hierarchical realism - that is- dominant hierarchies are so ingrained into our collective conscience that the majority of people are incapable of imagining a world post-hierarchy. That isn’t a dig, it takes a long time of focused work to deconstruct all of the inherent biases our upbringing imbues us with. As such, any imagining of an anarchist society by people in a hierarchical society will inevitably be tainted by those biases, and will therefore be unable to perfectly depict an anarchist utopia. (Doesn’t mean people haven’t tried, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed does a fair job that addresses your question to boot). To a degree, your question can never truly be answered. It is very much a question worth asking though.
Hierarchical realism not only taints our imagination towards the future. It taints our imagination for how we might oppose domination in the present. Hierarchy, primarily capitalism and the state in this instance, has stripped us of our self determination, the means and ability to manage our own affairs. From mending clothes to managing society, most of us are incapable of truly controlling our lives and are consequently reliant on the current systems of power for our very existence. Anarchists encourage people to reclaim their self determination because it’s vital to a thriving, citizen managed, society.
I’m sure you’ve noticed a trend in society that points toward a broad delegation of tasks that are vital to modern life. Meal delivery services, hardware that’s increasingly difficult to repair, the hyper-specialization of intellectual labor, broad individual isolation from community, public schooling that is geared to make good workers instead of an educated and capable population, representative democracy. Much of it stems from a systemic pressure to atomize human function and interaction that strips us of our self determination. Anarchists believe that reclaiming ou self determination not only empowers the individual, but creates an empowered society. A society organized without coercion, geared to ensure the individual is capable and supported to manage their life and interests, is one with people who know that allowing individuals to wield systemic power to control the collective is an idea worth rejecting.
On complex systems and decentralization:
Complex systems (as they apply to social structures) in a nutshell: society functions like a living organism. The status quo seeks to exist indefinitely and either resists harmful pressures or co-opts them in order to persist.
You are correct in saying that the power structures that anarchists propose isn’t rigid, it’s not supposed to be! The Anarchist approach to freedom and power is intentionally fluid, in part to allow the individual the maximal amount of freedom and self determination, as well as to entrench a system of collective power that is capable of changing and adapting to the ever changing needs of the community. In contrast, hierarchy is incredibly rigid. It is slow to change and slow to adapt,
A decentralized society is also more resilient in the face of disaster. Think of it in terms of cells, but not too hard lol. It isn’t a great analogy. A decentralized society would be best represented by a cellular culture. If one cell- hell, 90% of cells- die, the culture may still be able to recover and regrow. By nature of its complex organization, cells.dying doesn’t necessarily mean death of the culture. The remaining cells can adapt to the endogenous or exogenous pressures that lead to cell death in the first place and come out stronger than before. In this analogy, hierarchy would be considered a single cell. If the surrounding environment becomes inhospitable to the cell, or the cell develops some horrible mutation in one of its organelles, the cell dies. That’s the end of the cell and something else that is either capable of dealing with the environment or isn’t terminally mutated will take its place.
You recognized this in your comment and I can’t do it justice so I’ll stop there on complex systems but I hope I painted a decent picture. See this video for a much better explanation.
On the cyclical nature of human history:
Hierarchy isnt new, and neither are horizontal societies. Human history is a tapestry of these social forms existing in parallel, with one being more prevelant than the other at times. Most of our written history has occurred in some form of hierarchical society, but the majority of human history points toward a largely horizontal structure. I won’t call these structures anarchic, but they do speak to the horizontal impulses present in the overwhelming majority of humans.
The way I, and many anarchists, see it, people have cooperative and competitive impulses. A horizontal social structure reinforces our cooperative drive, while a hierarchical social structure reinforces our competitive drive. Human history as we currently understand it seems to bear this truth out. The late anthropologist David Graeber has said that human history seems to operate on a roughly 500 year cycle; where different social forms emerge, replace their predecessor, grow in strength and area, and are eventually replaced by other emergent forms. This isn’t necessarily saying hierarchical forms are replaced by horizontal forms. Feudalism was replaced by capitalism after all. It’s simply pointing out that social organizations seem to have an expiration date. Capitalism emerged in the 16th century, it may be well on its way to replacement. Anarchists want to replace it with something as close to anarchy as we can imagine. In 500 years anarchy may go down on the path you described. With people slowly reinventing hierarchical forms that were abolished well beyond living memory. It might also be replaced by something more horizontal and equitable than we can imagine. A post-anarchy, if you will.
I hope that these errant threads were able to answer your question. I wanted to add some more thoughts here to kind of tie them all together but I’m coming up short. This reply wasn’t as direct as my last one, but the resources I’ve peppered throughout my comment may be able to satisfy that if I missed the mark here.
Feel free to ask any more questions you might have too! I’m happy to have a go at them
Yes, you did answer my questiom very well especially with the part about cyclical history. I will watch the resources you linked to in both comments. Again, I am very thankful tbat you took the time to answer me so thoroughly.
After I’ve done some studying, would you mind if I maybe DM’d you?