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A story as old as federated social media, in 3 parts
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
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Some acronyms you might see.
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Anarchists: Trust me, bro, we don’t NEED guardrails on power or democratic systems. We can just say “just be a good broski” and it all works out, if everyone’s living’ right. It’s beautiful, man.
Also anarchists, whenever they get even a pretty infinitesimal amount of power:
It's not a problem with anarchists in general, I think, but that the kind of anarchists who put themselves into positions of power are generally... not the ones you want in power. Regardless of ideology, power, even the smallest, pettiest kind, tends to attract a certain kind of person more often, on average.
I thought the point of anarchy was not having positions of power.
There are always positions of power. Anarchists are interested in minimizing the institutionalization of power and individual offices. And also, that even anarchists don't live in a currently-anarchist society/structure, and have to work within that. Don't believe Lemmy has implemented
Just to add on to your mention of there always being positions of power, I believe there is a difference between someone having power/authority in a specific moment or in a limited capacity versus a hierarchy.
A hierarchy enforces compliance from the top down, while individuals are capable of ceding to limited authority in specific situations; see every Anarchist military unit like the CNT, RIAU, BOAK, YPG and YPJ. Any individual member has the right to disobey, to leave. It’s not a contract enforced by the UCMJ, with codes criminalizing dissent and desertion, like in the US military.
I think the difference between positions inherently having power and hierarchical power have been explained much better in other comments, but I just wanted to add that there are real world examples of Anarchists consenting to power/leadership, and it resulting in effective small unit combat effectiveness, outside of thought experiments or generalities.
I mean, I feel the need to point out that dissent, refusal of orders, and desertion were all punishable in CNT militias.
Any wartime unit is necessarily going to be stricter on such things, as coordination, timing, and accurate estimations are all vital in military operations.
The anarchist militias were very effective in the Spanish Civil War, though, you are correct about that.
Thank you for the clarification, that’s really interesting.
Was desertion specifically deserting a line unit on rotation? Could an enlisted person willingly leave when their unit was rotated off the line for resupply for example? Or was it more a situation where upon enlistment you willfully submitted to the commands authority for the period of enlistment?
Do you have any recommendations for reading material on that subject specifically? I had just assumed the CNT operated like most of the other militias I mentioned, although now that I’m thinking about it I guess most of the anecdotal evidence for fighters dropping in and out at will are foreign (predominantly white) volunteers, so that just might be my privilege showing.
It's been a long time since I've done serious reading on the subject, unfortunately. Article 4 of the CNT regulations for militiamen outlines offenses, though, and treating abandoning one's post and desertion as separate offenses suggests it wasn't just leaving the front line that counted as desertion.
Yeah, but if your system is anarchist, those are exactly the kind of people who are going to wind up running things.
There’s a lot of overlap between anarchism and good sense. I’m not trying to be snarky about it. But it does seem that it has a couple of fatal flaws, and that is one. You could say that the early anarchists and the American founding fathers both identified the same types of failure modes in government and societal hierarchy, and where the founding fathers came up with a flawed system that nonetheless made a sincere effort to design a society of free individuals who could each live their lives in a pretty anarchist-friendly fashion, while still taking account of the realities of power and how to mitigate the problems of it… the anarchists just decided, “If we don’t pay attention to these problems then they won’t exist, much easier.”
Just picking a random point in this giant thread to chime in. I am an anarchist who is sometimes capable of being serious. So if you want to pick my brain, as PugJesus suggested, feel free.
One thing that I feel I should point out in regards to this particular comment is that anarchists do not advocate for creating power vacuums. Generally speaking, we advocate for people to self-govern in a much more direct way than representative democracy allows for. We urge the creation of voluntary institutions for managing social coordination, shaped by the needs of their members. We want to get rid of positions of power in ways that don't result in a power vacuum, because people have their needs met and are no longer looking for guidance from a strongman.
We also (usually) recognize that our ideal isn't going to be perfectly achievable, but we instead seek to get closer to that ideal as we discover new ways to practically do so.
I see that you read a summary of Kropotkin's ideas, which is cool. He was an anarcho-communist specifically, which is probably the most popular anarchist tendency. I tend to advocate for mutualism, in part because I think it's easier to understand for people that are accustomed to how capitalist societies function. The short, very oversimplified version is: abolish absentee ownership, create an economy of cooperatives, and gradually replace government institutions with more co-ops.
There's sometimes tension between the different strains of anarchism, but usually we recognize that we're all working towards roughly the same thing. Any future anarchist society is likely to be a patchwork of various frameworks serving different groups of people who have different preferences.
It all sounds very good. I don't, honestly, feel like I have any questions at this point, but it sounds really good, thank you for your message.
It's... more complex than that. You should pick a more serious anarchist's brain. They do consider these problems.
Personally, I think the term 'anarchy' works against them because of its literal meaning and its connotations. I always mentally replace it with the synonym of libertarian socialism, and find it works wonders in reducing preconceptions.
It does, but there isn't much we can do about it. Its literal meaning (an-archos, no rulers) is exactly what we want, so we have to die on that hill.
The "bad" meaning of anarchy comes from what most people think would happen without some kind of ruler in charge of society. So if we were to largely switch to some other term, people would start to view that more negatively the more it caught on. Even "libertarian socialism" is pretty awkward, given the connotations of "socialism" in the mainstream.
Is there someone I should read? I read some of the Wikipedia article to try to educate myself but I didn’t get all that far.
Edit: I think the fact that I made someone so salty they felt the need to downvote this comment means I’m doing something right.
Discussing the matter with actual anarchists is preferable. There are fewer central agreed-upon texts to anarchism (appropriately enough, lmao), and many of those that remain influential are... quite thick. Kropotkin is available if you are the patient sort.
I read the abridged version of the abridged version of Kropotkin just now. I like it quite a lot. I more or less stand by my assessment of the flaws in it, as compared with an approach like the founders of the US, but it sounds like good stuff. I think like a lot of things the devil is in the details.
I am mostly being snarky about the laughable brand of faux-anarchism that got me banned and deleted in this instance, not trying to throw too much shade at real anarchism.
This is almost the exact opposite of an anarchist understanding of power.
The point of anarchist critiques of the state is that the structure and systems themselves corrupt and constrain people into acting in ways that are authoritarian and harmful.
So, even if you put a good person, and yes, even an anarchist into an authoritarian system, it will inevitably result in an abuse of power and violence towards oppressed people.
This is exactly why anarchists generally don’t put forth candidates or actively campaign or support political parties in the existing system. Because embedding a different, even better person into a corrupt system will only lead to further corruption.
I actually think that, ironically, this is a perfect validation of anarchist theory. Lemmy is a platform that was built by and for authoritarians (initially capitalists as Reddit, then only slightly modified by authoritarian leftists on Lemmy). The structure of moderation with mods and admins able to unilaterally take action and the difficulty of organized resistance inevitably leads to abuses, which is what this community is about.
I’m still waiting for the social media platform that has better infrastructure for distributed power among users rather than the chosen few.
I feel obligated to point out that the goal is not necessarily to make the system 'good', but to avert catastrophic consequences from the very-powerful-current-system taking an all-out position of "Crush the workers, kill the minorities" when such a thing is very much negative for anarchist initiatives and very much avoidable.
All politics is about power, whether its restraint, its redistribution, or its dismantling - and decisions from anyone who considers their political positions serious must, in that vein, be strategic, not merely spiritual.
I agree with you but I don’t think these two ideas are completely contradictory. My experience after participating in and studying liberal democracy for decades now is that the existing political structure is not going to meaningfully stop its worst harms no matter who is elected to lead it. As a result, organizations that build power outside of the constraints of electoral politics will be essential for any meaningful change, whether incremental or revolutionary.
But yes, if we can keep fascists out of power by voting, I support that. However, I feel strongly that voting is not even the bare minimum of political activity that we should be engaged in.
See, I think liberal democracy is perfectly capable of stopping its worst harms in the case of an educated and active citizenry (what a fucking endeavor that is to undertake... we're nowhere close to that at the moment), but I also support organizations that build power outside of electoral politics, as alternative bases of power mandate negotiation, implicit or explicit, from the ruling power, and reduce the chance of abuse of power.
While the view of the government as a single unitary entity is foolish in my view, and thus even a society without strong non-government entities is not automatically doomed to tyranny because of the necessarily factional and disunited nature of government, a society with strong non-government entities providing alternatives is almost always better poised for liberty (and the preservation of liberty) than one without. At least within the modern context of statehood. Pre-modern polities were often worse off regarding liberty with strong non-government entities.
It's why I like anarchists, even though I don't count myself as one. I view their methods and goals as conducive to liberty, even if I'm not sure as to the desirability or practicality of entirely abolishing the state as we would recognize it.
There is a great article somewhere that makes a case that unions as the prime entities of political power and organization, as opposed to political parties staffed by a separate class of politicians who do politics and only politics full-time, is about a hundred times better.
It used to be that way in this country, and then it wasn’t and we got that second thing instead, and my god look at what happened.
You sound primed for syndicalism, honestly.
I completely agree with you here. That is more or less what I was saying.
I talked about it in another comment, about the US founding fathers. There are certain malfunctions that humans have when you put them in a position of power, and a good choice for your "ism" that you're going to use when you're developing traditions of interaction with each other is going to take that into account.
I completely agree with all of this. I may write up a big longer essay with some of my thoughts about what could be done about it. The ability to have a little peaceful-protest community like this one is quite a nice step forward, but the software is still not a completely comfortable fit, overall.
This may be my favorite comment on lemmy. I applaud the introspection and appreciate the irony you've brought to light.
Eh. I'm an anarchist and find that sort of mid behavior reprehensible and completely contrary to anarchic philosophy. Anarchism is about not having rulers or hierarchical structures. It's not about not having rules because those are important for a collaborative society.
I'd also say that anti-electoralists are generally either ethically compromised or completely ignorant. I have found no sign of accelerationism, which anti-electoralism is mathematically indistinguishable from, ever having a positive effect. So, they want to sacrifice people (but not themselves) and increase suffering for a chance at a condition that they think will allow for their utopia, despite a lack of any evidence to suggest it would actually work.
Most often though, you have bad faith actors like that mod infiltrating and destroying spaces for anarchism, either intentionally or as acceptable collateral damage in their mission to sow discord.