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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Memes of Production
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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A community can collectively decide on rules, and collectively decide how to enforce those rules. If someone is harming the community and will not stop when asked, the community can decide to forcibly eject that person from the community.
So, yes, I (with enough backing of the community) do get to tell hypothetical-you that you can't shit in the drinking water.
Yes. The difference between our current system and Anarchism is that it is much, much harder to create a system that does not benefit the everyone, since the people who are usually negatively effected by the whims of corporations or centralized power would now have the ability to directly have a say in how their local community decides on rules and how to enforce them.
There would also be no wealthy elites who can influence things, as there would be no mechanism or ability for an individual to accumulate vast resources or wealth.
But isn't this going to create issues for minority if what its members want is reasonable but inconveniences the majority? I don't want to come up with a specific example, but something like improved accessibility for a disabled person that requires resources and may be seen as unnecessary by most comes to mind
Afaik it's one of the issues with democracy: how to define what is good for everyone when people have conflicting interests and groups are disproportionate
Minority groups or people with disabilities would be just as entitled as anyone else at a community meeting to determine what gets done. In Rojava, minorities get to speak first to ensure their concerns are heard by the majority, and issues can be worked out via consensus decision making, which would help ensure that the needs of minorities or people with disabilities are not ignored.
Yeah, consensus sounds like a good solution I didn't think of. But then there are scaling issues, imo, consensus is not for thousands at once, maybe we get to representatives interacting with neighbouring communities, but that already seems to diverge from original idea
You're definitely on the right path! A community could elect recall-able delegates (which are distinct from representatives) to interact with other community's or their delegates, which can collectively implement wider rules, such as regulating cross-community electricity grids, or organize bigger projects that would need multiple communities to participate in to accomplish. With that, the different communities can still operate horizontally, but be able to collaborate together with federation, much like how lemmy itself operates :D
Sounds reasonable as you've written it. I do worry about people's over willingness to bend the knee, especially when they're frightened or angry. It seems like someone with a strong personality could convince people to go along with stuff that benefits him more than them. But, no system is immune to bad actors and idiots.
Agreed. Though I think it would be particularly difficult for a strongman or strong personality to take hold in an Anarchist society.
If it was successfully implemented, and everyone is now receiving free housing, food, healthcare, public transport, and education all in exchange for 2 to 3 months of voluntary work (the rest being free time), I think it would be exceptionally difficult to convince that populace that actually they should actually go back to the old way where they work for him all year in exchange for some paper that would then give you access to those things which you already have for free.
I just think it would be almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle, just as it would've been almost impossible for medieval kings and lords to bring back serfdom after mercantilism/capitalism was established.
Can anyone else decide to forcibly eject a person from the community?
If no, then your democratic council/process has a monopoly on violence, and the question arises what differentiates it from a state.
If yes, that raises many more questions.
That would depend on how that local community collectively decides to operate. Most would likely opt for community consensus for something so serious, where an individual cannot forcibly eject someone from the community if there is not community consensus.
A state is a centralized hierarchy of power that operates in a top-down structure, where the people at the top of the hierarchy have the ultimate say on what happens to those at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Anarchism's goal is to decentralize power and make any societal structures as horizontal as possible. A local community would have final say on things that effect that local community, and if there are any people elected by a community to participate in a larger federated structure, that elected person is able to be immediately re-callable by the community that elected them if they fail at performing the duties they were tasked with. They would also be elected as a Delegate, not a Representative.
The question of majority vs. supermajority is not the question; the question is whether that process is the only means by which the society accepts casting one of their own out.
In which case most modern states aren't states at all.
Okay, but do you not realize this is how representatives in extant systems have defined themselves since time immemorial?
What makes this incarnation different?
Again, that's nowhere near how most representatives or representative systems would describe themselves, or, realistically, be described.
And... you don't find that elections, campaigns, measuring honesty or integrity of candidates, or political tribalism is something anarchist society will have to deal with?
You do realize that's the exact argument we use today in representative democracies, and most people shrug it off like water off a duck's back, right?
And why would the people not scapegoat their delegate for any issue they felt sufficient guilt about? "It wasn't explained clear enough, that wasn't what we meant (and you can't prove it was), we only meant it under very specific conditions, etc"
What is the difference, practically speaking, other than the Representative is now the PEOPLE'S Representative? And yes, that's intentionally invoking the coat-of-paint used by ML societies. Not to equate this anarchist polity proposed with MLs, but to point out that, just as MLs often dress up their structures as though they're new and innovative, oftentimes all they are is fundamentally the old structure with all of its previously flaws and failings - only now those flaws and failings are considered 'politically incorrect' to address.
... that's generally the exact opposite of how representative democracy describes itself, and, again, works.
... you do realize that many modern polities have recall elections available for any reason, right?
In what fucking way? Other than pointing out that many polities which do have instant recall even for the executive still plunge into wars and genocide, in what way does the 'delegate' stop people from making self-destructive decisions? Fuck, man, the Iraq War, unjust as it was, had, what, 80% approval in the general population when it started? Whose use of recall was going to unscrew that pooch?
You do realize that most wars are not started in the face of overwhelming popular opposition, right?
... right...?