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Oh no, Anarchists!
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Lefty Memes
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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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No rulers doesn't mean no rules
Who has authority to enforce those rules? If no one, then how do you resolve disputes in a civil, yet binding fashion?
This is a big question, and the real answer is, "it's up to the community to decide". But I know that's not very satisfying despite being correct, so here's an example of how it could work.
The first step is to lower crime / anti-social behaviour. If everyone in the community is happy, there's less need for anti-social behaviour. Sharing food and pooling resources, helping your neighbour out, teaching children the value of working together, etc. Most people obey the rules and want to be good people but are driven to crime through desperate circumstances [citation needed, but it seems to be true in most of my daily face-to-face interactions].
However, there are always some people who do whatever they want regardless of the cost to others, and some people who specifically want to behave badly. It should be explained to these people why what they're doing is harmful and try to teach some empathy. The next step might be denying resources which aren't essential to life, so that they don't benefit from the community that they are harming. Finally, if they keep being anti-social, they can be imprisoned for the good of the community.
As it stands in my society, the police have a monopoly on legitimate violence. If you want someone physically restrained, it's up to the police to do so. One problem with this is that the police suck balls. In an anarchist society, the solution could be to have a police force that is made up of randomly selected citizens and rotated every few years. No-one gets to keep this position of authority for long, no-one gets to refuse except because of health reasons, and they are held strictly accountable to everyone else.
But honestly, I don't think the police will be needed often. You've probably seen examples of self-governing systems around you. Think of that one shitty neighbour that no-one likes. How often do you look after their plants when they're on holiday, go shopping for them when they're ill, lend a hand when they're doing some building work? The only way they get through life is because they use money to pay people who don't yet know how shitty they are. In a society without money (because money creates unjust hierarchy), a lot of their options for being shitty and still having a nice life are removed.
I hope you were asking your question seriously because I ended up saying quite a lot! This is something I'm quite passionate about as you can probably tell. The organisation that I volunteer with has a flat structure so it's also something that I have a lot of experience with in a smaller way
I am being genuine in my arguments. Political discussions are no fun when the disingenuous trolls take over, even if my sarcastic nature leaks out and I come across that way sometimes.
That first step is a doozy. And is basically the step that every political system gets kind of stuck on. The goal is simple enough, but the actual "how" of getting it done, not to mention how to maintain it once you've achieved it, is enormously complex.
And the society without money thing I don't think is actually possible, unless you want to go back to a purely agrarian society. Money, at it's core is just a placeholder for resources to simplify bartering. The systems we've built around it are often fucked and can go, but money itself is just a useful tool.
I don't believe that every society / political system does seek to cut crime. For example, parts of the USA right now are seeking to criminalise sleeping outside and other forms of homelessness rather than solving the problem. It has been proven (and is also very obvious) that if you give someone housing and a stable income, they stop being homeless. It's kinda in the name of "home less". But a lot of powerful people in America are more interested in keeping rich people rich and people who "don't deserve it" in the gutters - figuratively and literally. In my vision of an Anarchist Utopia Society TM, the main goal would be to keep as many people happy and healthy as possible which would, by definition, involve lowering crime, anti-social behaviour, homelessness, etc.
A good example would be the UK which offers speed awareness courses to drivers who are caught breaking the speed limit. This is sometimes cheaper for the offender and avoids getting points on your driving license (too many points means a driving ban). Drivers who took this speed awareness course are less likely to reoffend than people who chose not to take it.
As for a moneyless society, I think it is possible as part of my Anarchist Utopia Society TM and I don't want to start another arguement about that because I have limited time and energy for online arguments. We'll just have to agree to disagree for now :)
I really am curious what you mean by "moneyless" though. Like, is it just doing away with the money systems we've built (like banks, stock markets, etc) or is getting rid of the concept altogether and returning to simple bartering?
Gift based economy. I help you because I know that you will help me. If someone doesn't pull their weight then they won't get help. Basically everything runs on social currency and who owes who (but it's not as strict as "I owe Jenny £5.83", it's more like "Jenny's my friend so I'll help her)
How does that scale up to large communities where people aren't generally going to know each other on that level?
Just swap people for communities. "we should help community X because we know they'll help us".
Or maybe you do need to barter at a larger scale? This is all theoretical anyway because, remember, this is in Fantasy Utopia Anarchy Land TM
All good ideas start off theoretical. These are just the details that need to be considered in order to turn a good concept into an actual functioning system.
Bartering is a feature of money systems, not their origin. Andrewism summarizing David Graeber YT.
I'm trying to set up an org like that myself currently. Any good advice?
I have been thinking about your question a lot and kept saying I'd wait till I was at my computer and type out something good and thoughtful. But apparently that's not happening so you're getting whatever I type next at 1am and hopefully it's helpful :P
I don't think I can really give advice because it depends on what you want to do, the size of your organisation, and (most importantly) what you and your friends / colleagues want. What I'll do instead is talk about the things I like and dislike at my place and hopefully you can pull something useful from it.
One of the great strengths of anarchism is how flexible it is. I mean this in two ways - firstly, it can be applied in many different forms in many different contexts. The main strength though is that you can more easily change how you work day to day. No single person should be irreplaceable. Of course, everyone has their own strengths, skills and knowledge and you should respect and cherish everyone you work alongside. But there's no one big boss who needs to be there for anything to get done. Everyone is important; no-one is vital. Where I work, it's easy for me to take a day off and know that the work will still get done.
I volunteer for an environmental nonprofit. I'm one of about 70 volunteers and we have 6 staff members, half of whom are part time. There does tend to be a bit of a hierarchy with staff members being viewed as more important. It's something we all try to avoid but because they are paid to be there, they have a lot more available time and effort than those of us who have other things going on in our lives. However, I'm very grateful for the staff because they can take care of all the 'boring but necessary' work - things like applying for grants, paperwork for new volunteers, taking care of rent and utilities, etc. It's useful to have people who are contractually obligated to take care of these things so that I can go about the more interesting (to me) jobs. So my first advice would be to make sure you have any strict obligations covered by someone who is invested in your project.
We have meetings once a month where everyone is invited where we tend to discuss the big-picture issues. This could be topics like "what is our vision" or applying for an award or talking about ongoing problems we might be having. We have an agenda and take minutes, and we have a newsletter and several group chats so everyone can be informed. Communication is very important. However, don't be disappointed if not many people show. We only have about 10% of our people show up any given month. Most people only have an hour or two a week to volunteer and don't care for flat structure, big picture, whatever. They just want to help out and have other things going on. That's fine, because the door is always open for those who do want to have a voice.
I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I would say expect a lot of informal chats and decision making to end up being important. A lot of issues can be solved just by talking to your teammates, because everyone has the power to discuss and make changes. This is a good strength of flat structure! However, it can mean that sometimes you have an informal chat while working, it doesn't stay in your mind, and one person walks away thinking the problem will be solved and the other person has completely forgotten about it. That might just be because we are always feeling overworked though!
Last thing I'll say just because I feel like this is very long - you have to appreciate everyone's efforts and meet them where they're coming from. Everyone is unique and brings something important with them, and it's important to tell them you appreciate them. If they give an hour a week, they helped and are valid. If they are joining different teams, weighing in, stepping forward, that's great too. You have to make sure that people have the option to take leadership positions but also have the option to step back.
The place I work has really changed me for the better. It's a journey I was already on, but my time with these wonderful people has made me more patient, understand, emotionally open, happy, able to share in the success we make together. Finding the right group of people and letting them be free to make their community better is the essence of anarchism to me
Ah I don't have nearly enough people helping me out (especially with the bureaucratic stuff) haha. It's a struggle trying to start an org on my own to the point that I think it's probably not a workable idea unless I have a lot of people who want to help with the bureaucratic stuff.
If you're anything like me then you are planning the perfect version of your project and won't be happy unless you can get there straight away. We have a physical storefront, many people to organise, legal obligations as a business, and we work with several other charities and businesses that we need to coordinate with. That's why I like having some people who I know are there to work on admin tasks.
When we started though, it was just three university students distributing food from the back of a car. Start small, with what you and your people can manage, and you'll grow and adjust in time. And if it turns out that you can't make it work, then you still made a difference in the time you were operating and you still had a good time with your friends along the way. There's a recent post that's very pertinent that I'll try to find and link to
EDIT: https://chaos.social/@saxnot/112349120606446433
For the record, I've already started. We've been going for a year and a half now in fact , but the process to make this into some sort of entity etc is all on me so I can't do it all
Ah, nice! I don't have any specific advice for that front because I only joined my thing when it was mostly set up and going strong already
The community enforces rules?
Ok, but scale that up and try to account for bad actors. Human nature isn't going to change, and so the are guaranteed to be people working to abuse the system. "The community will enforce" is just handwaving away the problem without actually dealing with it, just as much as bullshit like "the free market will solve x problem" is.
And how is the problem solved currently in your mind?
The difference between what we have today and what we want to see isn’t some magical world where things work perfectly, it’s one where people can make the changes directly without a ruling class deciding for us.
I try to think of systems that are stable and can scale up to cover everyone (this is also a pipe dream, since people aren't purely rational). The idea of no one in charge, and the community deciding and enforcing everything can work up to a small town level, but a national or global level, it falls apart.
Some things, like major infrastructure for example, are necessary to have, but impossible to fund through voluntary means. No individual or small community has the money to build it on their own, and getting everyone to agree on what exactly should be done for any given project is damn near impossible. There needs to be a central planning authority of some sort, and they need to have the funding to execute these types of projects. Now what scale and format that planning authority has is the heart of every debate on which political system is best.
The community is in charge. It’s democracy without a class of rulers. Its people working together because it brings them mutual benefit instead of a system built on exploiting others for personal gain.
You can have a “central planning authority”, it would just be voluntarily made up of those small town level groups.
I know that's the goal, but what are the specifics on how it's implemented? How does it handle the smooth talker who wants to warp the system into something else for his personal gain? By the time you build in mechanics to handle these edge cases (without just handwaving it away with "the community will enforce it"), you converge back towards something similar to one of the various political systems we have today.
Maybe I'm just too pessimistic to get behind the anarchist thing. My day job is industrial automation and people not doing what was expected or what is best is what causes 90% of my headaches. Relying on people to behave rationally and do what's best just isn't in my nature anymore.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you could have central planning, but they wouldn't have any authority...
They would have the authority of the groups they represent.
Think of the UN, they don’t have power to enforce things yet they get shit done all over the world.
Is it perfect? No
Is anything perfect? No
Is it better than authoritarianism? Yes.
I'd be careful with this example. One of the key issues people take with the UN that they indeed can't enforce things, like in Gaza. Security council approved a ceasefire, but the fighting goes on. Russia doing genocide in Ukraine, UN tells RU that they need to stop being bad.
For the record they of course do stuff, but if you'd like to advocate for anarchism I'd use a more effective example. If even the UN can't stand up to fascism, what shot does an anarchy have, ya know?
The only group enforcing things in Gaza is Israel. UN or no UN, nothing changes there so any idiot complaining about the UN for not fixing it is misguided.
The UN is not an example of anarchism, it's a collection of authoritarian states with a lot of hierarchy. It's an example of voluntary mutual framework where force does not have to be used to create progress.
That's what I mean. That's a very weird example for you to use in this case, pick a different organization if you wanna talk about how great anarchism is. The UN ain't it.
Isn't that what we have right now
No? At best we have 'representatives', who barely represent a quarter of what any one voter wants.
Right, but it's voluntarily elected by smaller groups. The fact that the representatives don't align with most voter's interests in every topic is a fundamental problem of agreement, not a problem specific to the method of organization.
As long as the apps at the top of the app stores and songs on the top of the charts are the ones that corporations most advertised, and as long as people will listen to conspiracy theories from Q Anon and demand freedom of speech from Twitter, I genuinely do not trust people to have direct access to decision making. Ask middle class Americans think the biggest political issue right now is the tik tok ban
So instead you prefer the decision making to be in the hands of a small group of people all paid for and owned by the corporations, and who pander to the conspiracy nuts?
I wonder what you think politicians are, and whose interests they're acting on (hint: it isn't yours, and depending on how much ~~"lobbying" money~~ bribes they've gotten, it might not even be their own, see those who serve the oil lobby for example)
The people who taught you what "human nature" is, have a vested interest specifically in you thinking that humans are naturally greedy cut throat creatures, because that serves their systems of exploitation and oppression which they need you to continue to participle[ate in not because it's fact.
Beyond that, your argument is 100% appeal to tradition, and you not being able to imagine existence outside of the social constructs that have been around in some cases for a mere couple of hundred, in other cases for, at most, 4-5 thousand years, doesn't mean it isn't possible, only that you've been indoctrinated well enough in to believing that is the case.
You've completely misunderstood what I mean when I say "human nature isn't going to change". I'm not saying that all humans are greedy, or going to abuse the system. The "human nature" I'm talking about is the variability of peoples' personalities. This guarantees that at some point, no matter how idyllic the society you've created is, someone is going to come along to break it. And they may not even be acting out of malice. It might simply be that they think they can do it even better. Any system you set up needs to have mechanisms to deal with that.
Oh no, I never considered human nature! My whole worldview is ruined!
What's to stop the community from getting it horrendously wrong, as human communities have done so many times in the past?
What stops it currently?
Laws (at least somewhat) and the state's monopoly on violence
Oh states don’t get anything horrendously wrong?
Huh, didn’t know that.
No, they definitely do. It's just a wider cast net of more people so the error margin is lower. Think of getting 1 vs 10 vs 1000 people to guess how many jellybeans in a jar.
"The community" usually doesn't. The most likely result is the bystander effect.
So you’re saying for nearly 200,000 years people sat around feeling zero sense of responsibility for their group and never acted?
How much of the bystander effect is in part because we are disenfranchised from managing ourselves and our communities? “Oh that’s not my job, I’ll sit here being useless because the cops/&tc will come along and manage it for me”.
For 200,000 years, the world was an extremely violent place, where slavery, genocide, etc were the norm. The idea is usually to try to move away from that.
Of course, there are not more people in slavery today than at any other time in the past, nor does genocide go on especially not in industrial scales.
Scale those thoughts to the human populations at the time. To give an extreme example, if Genghis Khan caused the same scale of death today, that would be 800,000,000 dead.
The world today is far better than it was, but nobody said it is was anywhere near perfect.
Uhhh.... yes, for any community large enough that they didn't know everyone in it.
Which has been debunked, as is mentioned further down the link you yourself posted