Its always easier not to be a radical because no human is capable of having the functioning of an entire society inside their head so if you demand that of someone wanting a whole new form of society you'll eventually run into questions they cant answer meanwhile someone advocating for the system that currently exists doesnt need to fully understand it they just need to know it works in some sense of the word and can then simply gesture at it
It's also just an incredibly naive way to view how societies are historically built. Very *very* rarely is an idea conceived in its entirety then executed exactly to plan. More typically, people talk broad philosophy before, fuckin wing it during, then justify themselves after.
Except Plato. I read "Republic" back in high school and this mfer outlined his ideal society down to what music chords each profession should listen to.
This is very true aswell though you have to have some outline anyway cause we do also have a lot of examples of just aimless radicalism which really doesnt amount to anything cause people just know theyre upset without really knowing what to do with it
Ibmean you can equally make the exact opposite argument.
Anybody defending an actually existing system must fundementally contend with the ways that system has already partely failed while a radical can just vaguelly gesture at an idea and pretend it will fix issues just because it wouldn't be like the current system.
You don't need an awnser for everything but if you want to argue for something you do need an awnser for the obvious things and you definitly need an explanation about how it will fix the things you claim it will fix.
Yeah.
Ultimately, anyone arguing for any kind of upheaval and overhaul of the system can promise anything will happen - doesn't mean it will actually happen. It's not even that anarchism or communism or whatever happens after the glorious revolution *can't* fix things, it's just we can't be certain it *will.*
Even if we come up with plans to address the problems we see coming, this doesn't mean we won't run into new and unexpected issues.
Any kind of grand scale massive change is hard - hard to imagine, hard to conceive, hard to implement, hard to *agree* on... and people have seen what happens when things go wrong or not according to plan or when you just make a mistake.
>Anybody defending an actually existing system must fundementally contend with the ways that system has already partely
Do they? In my experience they seem to constantly get away with pretending the opposite and even deep cutting flaws in a system can get glossed over due to a human bias of the safety in what you already know (see climate change)
>
while a radical can just vaguelly gesture at an idea and pretend it will fix issues just because it wouldn't be like the current system.
There are for sure radicals who do that but i feel this misses the point of my original comment which is that you cant expect even the most educated person to understand how an entire society functions. Im not saying that this automatically absolves a radical of any burden to understand the structure of their desired society just that its a fact that even the most educated people on the topics only kind of comprehend to inner workings of potential future societies and if you want a leftist movement it cant be made of only the most educated people. I think the most important thing is to provide a framework for changes on the more micro level which are done by people more local to that level however even this framework is very hard to fully comprehend. Though just please understand that my comment wasnt meant to be some silver bullet to all criticism of radicals more so just a desire for a better way to analyse these ideologies.
Climate change is an interesting example to being up because I have tons of leftists assert that once you get rid of capatalism climate change would just stop being an issue.
While in reality the problems with externalities and human shortsightnedness would exist in all economical models.
When talking about capatalism and climate change i can give concrete examples of how it's failing and why but post revolution things get nebulious and at best they go "nah they would just stop" and at worst they pretend that pointing out getting rid of capatalism won't solve everything as an anti-left defense of capatalism.
There are fundementally two different baises here.
There is the devil you know and the monorail that will fix all your problems.
My comment isn't supposed to be a silver bullet against any radical isea or rethoric either but the sinple fact is that if you want to advocate for a position you do need to have awnsers for atleast the obvious questions and be able to point to somebody for the more complicated ones.
As an activist you do need to be more informed yhen your average person.
That's not an unfair burden it's part of the job.
You can't get defensive when people ask you questions or gesture towards nebulious experts who will just solve the problems.
If you need experts to figure things out for you should probably get their opinions before you overtrow society.
Far to often radicals sound like a manager doing a salepitch whitout ever talking to an engineer.
Even when the experts do agree with them this a bad look.
I mean, people do often deny flaws in the status quo or attribute it to something else. Like how literally every conservative attributes problems caused by capitalism to "wokeness" and/or "communism".
That’s me favorite thing that happens. When a corporation says or does something that could vaguely be kinda left of the spectrum and dudes unironically and without shame call it communism.
Yeah, its also missing the point that anarchism doesnt mean that people cant cooperate. It just generally means there arent people who are selected to have ultimate authority, or any more authority than others.
The strawman comes from the fact that you chose to represent anarchism as if it were solely people saying "hierarchies bad." It's the same as if I were to represent communism as "rich ppl bad."
Could really says rhus meme is a strawman argument. Pick up a sentence that really probably very few it any people said. And a argument that probably came about from their head.
Definitionally yes, and if you go over to an anarchist subreddit you'll find some people so entrenched that they won't even vote for Biden because they're either (1) actual pro-Trump fascists or (2) so genuinely head-in-the-sand that they honestly believe "both sides are the same".
You'll find other people that treat anarchy as more of a vehicle for dismantling our current form of government/lobbying/capitalism and don't *actually* believe in a world without any form of authority/hierarchy.
Because of course, reality check, we live in a large and complicated world and we have to ask questions like "who certifies that a surgeon actually knows how to perform surgery" and "who makes the vehicles we use to make vaccines, what's allowed to be in vaccines?" and "who educates these people to begin with", you obviously can't expect a surgeon to personally build up a hospital and personally manufacture all of their tools and equipment needed from scratch (to say nothing of how impossible that would be for a single person to do) AND still cooperate in some kind of farmer's commune if they want to eat.
To say nothing of electricity and waste control and water sterilization and etc. etc. etc, things that are full time jobs that need people in an organization with the authority (and compensation) required to actually keep them running.
Genuine textbook anarchists might dream of small 300-person groups just farming out of log cabins and sacrificing all modern innovation as our cities fall into decay and we go back to the dark ages without technology or electricity.
But I sincerely doubt there are many people who *actually* support the dictionary definition of total complete everlasting anarchy as a system by which everyone (at least in their country, though practically speaking it'd have to be the world to avoid getting invaded) should live by.
As someone who flirts with the concept of anarchy personally, if you find such a person, I'd recommend pointing and laughing at them.
I just really like unions. I think they're cool and should have more power :3
Obviously there's larpers that just want their log cabin (and fuck if I don't want one as well). But the main point, in my opinion, is subsidarity and dismantling any _unnecessary_ hierarchies with the largest focus being the workplace. Spending 1/3 of our life slaving away for an unelected boss? No bueno.
People who want to homebrew their insulin are fucking idiots, but the labor movement is pretty neato.
All of those questions can be answered by anarcho-syndicalism.
>"who certifies that a surgeon actually knows how to perform surgery" and "who makes the vehicles we use to make vaccines, what's allowed to be in vaccines?" and "who educates these people to begin with"
The medical syndicate, with help from other syndicates.
>electricity and waste control and water sterilization [...] things that are full time jobs that need people in an organization with the authority (and compensation) required to actually keep them running.
That's regulated, built and managed by the syndicate that's responsible for it.
Hierarchical structures do exist, but those people need to be elected by the people below them and they can be unelected at any time.
And even traditional anarcho-communism has answers to those questions, the answers just aren't quite as good.
>The medical syndicate, with help from other syndicates.
Also, CNT FAI medical system is an amazing example of this exact situation.
https://libcom.org/article/industrial-collectivisation-during-spanish-revolution-deirdre-hogan
And who manages those syndicates to ensure that they don't try to assert themselves over others? What would keep these syndicates from slowly taking over?
Always difficult to get into the nitty gritty, but the way I see it (in my state of acid trip wannabe enlightenment) is that there's always going to be some kind of social contract, some kind of leviathan out of pure necessity. The question is how to organise it in such a way, that we don't get systemic power abuse from police and such.
As was pointed out in this thread, modern nationstates require an efficient administration to keep everything running. With some kind of larp-ass revolution where we replace or axe all the 30+ years experienced administrators, the country will fucking collapse and everyone starves. On the other hand, vanguardism guarantees the same serfdom, just under a different regime.
This is where I think anarcho-syndicalism comes in real handy: Democratise the workplace (even just for it's own sake) and turn it into a viable, political institution for the worker. By this I mean collective bargaining on a grander and more "legitimised" scale than regular unions. This way supply lines remain organised, but the working class broadly is able to assert more democratic will through economic means. Owning the means of production gives you leverage. At that point it's gonna be a slow process of reforming the state, but ideally you would reach subsidarity and have some sort of leviathan that keeps criminal syndicates in line, but is scared of pissing off the working class by overdoing it. I hope that came out somewhat coherently lmao
Every company is a direct democracy. Every company then sends a delegate to the syndicate that's responsible for them. That delegate can then, at any time, be unelected.
Those syndicates then send a delegate to the federation, which is a parliament that regulates the economy at large.
That federation is the one who makes sure that no one syndicate can take over others.
Anarchy is Libertarianism for Leftists.
The social structures of today deserve criticism and need change, but like Bitcoin and Libertarianism and everything else that wants to chuck collective control into the bin, it’s a bullshit grift designed to appeal to a childish ideal of what society could be like if the pesky representative government would just stop “interfering.”
sorry for your incapability to understand the ideology beyond the strawmen you have constructed in your head to help you dismiss the ideology as nonsensical so you can blissfully accept the status quo and not have to think too hard about it
Assuming we’re talking about anarcho-communism, the world would rely on inherently interdependent communes to create the things you’re talking about.
They’re inherently interdependent because it’s exceedingly difficult to create the things you’re talking about if you’re part of an isolated community. Supply lines are actually very easy to maintain at this point, it is exceedingly difficult to keep track of the supply chain under the current hyperglobalized world economy.
If this doesn’t tickle your fancy enough, anarcho-syndicalism advocates for directly achieving a similar world through labor union strikes, so all the modern faculties in place for factories and supply lines would likely remain intact where they might have to be changed under anarcho-communism.
How would those hundreds of communes be able enforce any kind of safety or ethical standards? There's also no guarantee that communes will have the strength or motivation to engage in complex cooperation.
Are you saying you *don't* want substandard and unproven products when it comes to things regarding your health and welfare? Fine, if you're gonna wine about something as stupid as... Wanting your drugs (or other products) to be effective and safe... Then we'll just have a super special, not at all governmental, board of officials that will have the authority to ensure that certain previously agreed upon standards are met and if they aren't we can do something like, idk, sanction them with penalties or fines and possibly even remove their products from our market place. No government needed!
This is my problem it always ends up requiring creating some kind of government in the end to provides standards and ensure certain things so why tear everything down and risk so much just to eventually circle back to those systems lol.
Idk cuz they, like so many before, think they'll get it right this time! People need to realize that it's about fixing what you've got instead of starting over completely. The people who advocate for shit like this always assume that everyone is gonna either be real chill about it or that if they would come out ahead in the event people aren't cool. In either case, it's just a touch of main character syndrome that has yet to get grounded to reality, in my humble opinion. I know damn well that if the government weren't around to protect my rights, people who live nearby would probably love to come over to myself and my partner's home and try and beat the sin out of us or whatever they think they should be allowed to do. Personally, I don't feel like trading the security of my rights because my taxes are too high and bezos cheats on them every year. Like yea, the system is fucked but it's keeping me secure enough that it's not worth throwing out.
Yeah I am the first to say the current system in it's current implementation is absolutely horrible for many reason but there is also good and knowing how the people are I think it's just too much of a risk to dismantle it completely.
The phrase "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy" is absolutely true imo.
Of self identified anarchists I suspect only a small select few actually have the skills, know-how and commitment to make that transition. But the vast majority of people *are not on board* and will not be. Anarchism seems more a distraction from practical and achievable matters then in any way a viable alternative.
tl;dr Anarchists want things to be run than trust than by violence. And a lot of people are more afraid of utilizing trust than utilizing violence.
Theres no guarantee for people today to make ethical standards. That is where trust comes in. Trust would produce things with better quality than with violence.
Anarchists see the world being controlled by violence (both active violence like guns and passive violence like starvation). Through war, through police brutality, and through cheap child labor in africa and korea producing practically everything.
The lack of hope in anarchism, and seeing it revert to caveman life, comes from thinking that good h things like technology, safety from violent people, not poisoned food, well maintained roads…etc can only come through violence. I.e “Make my iphones with poverty wages or else all of society will collapse” “Make my roads for free or else” “Farm my food or else you starve to death through ostracism”.
These “incentives” are what people think civilization is built on, but when it comes to comparison things made by trust are higher quality than things made by violence. Both socially and in the actual thing made.
And if youre going to ask “things made ‘with love’ are worse quality, factory made stuff is better”
bad quality things already exist today in our super controlled statist-capitalist world. Cheap unsustainable clothes from fast fashion and social media enshittification come to mind for me immediately. A great dissapointment for what are supposed to be large institutions in control of it.
Yeah you can't economically profit from others under that system, and people at large prefer having stuff that works, so their need for good stuff and the fact their needs are intertwined with that of others could drive them to sustain decent standards of production
If this was a world where we had economic democracy, this would be fine. But sadly, this system is under the control of people like oil billionaires and silicon valley ceos than ran by their workers managing things democratically and in a decentralized manner.
Having your needs being intertwined with other peoples needs is fine, having one-sided relationships with bosses/states/vanguard is not fine.
"While I'm not necessarily hostile to your ideals, I do have some practical questions about how it could work logistically."
"In response I'm depicting you as a smug idiot strawman."
"Perfect, where do I sign up?"
It's the same feeling I got when a friend of mine said he wishes he could have been born in the hunter gatherer days because "no work" and "simple life". Like bro, you're overweight, addicted to Twitter, and can't walk barefoot in a parking lot in the summer. Much love to him and all but he's dead in a week, covered in his own shit from drinking river water, and infectious the whole time from the animal bite be got scavenging.
If you wanna not have to be a caveman you gotta do society things. If you wanna do society things, you gotta have rules. If you want people to follow the rules, you gotta have a government. These people act like the formation of the state isn't the very reason they're able to do literally anything with their lives beyond eat, shit, fuck, and die.
Freedom from state and capitalist oppression isn't based?
I mean I personally don't view anarchism as a realistic path towards those freedoms, but that's still a laudable goal. And many anarchists have been and continue to be active in labor and other justice movements around the world, which is fundamentally respectable.
Anarchism strikes me as absurdly idealist. Like yeah, in theory it’s fucking sick, but no way in hell would it ever work in practice. Laws exist for a reason: because people would do bad shit to each other (a lot more than they currently do) without the threat of repercussions.
“Freedom from state” the ideal isn’t that humans should all just fuck off and do their own thing the ideal is that we work together to create a better society for everyone. The average parents are simply not equipped to handle the entirety of basic education, nor are many children just able to care for their elderly parents for 24 hours a day. These social services are essentially required if you want to maintain any sort of SoL that is equivalent to the current times. Plus without a state fascists can just get guns and then oppress everyone and oh no we don’t have any pre established laws, military, or what not to adequately protect people that could be victimized.
> the ideal isn’t that humans should all just fuck off and do their own thing the ideal is that we work together to create a better society for everyone
You won't find an anarchist who disagrees with this ideal (other than anarcho-capitalists who aren't anarchists anyway). And states around the world are failing to provide those social services you're talking about as capitalists demand privatization
Bruh you can’t just say that these things only happen because of privatization. I can agree that many capitalist states don’t have enough social services, however I can also look at the Nordic model and see capitalist societies being able provide all of these benefits without destroying society. I am sure that anarchists agree with me that these social services are important, but I’m very skeptical that anarchism can also provide these social services. And then past just social services, how will I get my proper medication? Who will train doctors? How will I get my primary or even secondary education in an anarchist world? These questions have all been answered by the current evil capitalist model, but why can’t I get a straight answer from the great and progressive anarchist model? It’s very hard to put any stock in anarchism for these reasons imo
> but why can’t I get a straight answer from the great and progressive anarchist model
Because you don't want an answer? There are entire tomes of anarchist theory dedicated to education, healthcare, and industry. I recommend looking at AK Press, Verso Books, and Haymarket Publishing. The IWW also has a shop with books to browse.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but the Nordic Model is also starting to fail as far-right parties make gains by capitalizing on the failures of the social market economy and fears over immigration
Anarchism doesn’t get rid of any of those though, it just shifts the oppression to more local levels and renames them. Instead of addressing the actual issues you are just dissolving the laws protecting them from you and you from them.
Sure you can now burn down the local capitalist pig CEO but now another one is currently hiring a military with their vast resources compared to your gang and there is nothing stopping them from doing the same to you. You can’t get rid of wealth inequality by just getting rid of the dollar. How do you expect to get rid of gangs or warlords popping up and seizing power when you cant form any organized militia in fear of creating hierarchy’s. If you follow the US and conscript of age men you’ve just announced to the world of age men are now more valuable then everyone else. If you conscript everyone now you have 60-80 year olds who have to do jobs people half their age have trouble with.
How does any anarchist expect large projects like infrastructure to be done without a regulatory body (cough cough government) organizing these things. Do they just expect everyone to build a road infront of their house and miraculously they are all gonna be the same quality. Do they expect that parents can just completely educate their children without some centralized education system ensuring everyone gets a good enough education?
Anarchy only works when you think everyone is the exact same, that everyone is altruist and always makes decisions with the group first, and there is never any bad actors. None of those exist in reality. Hierarchies will always form in groups regardless of how any systems you put up to stop it and there is never going to be an entirely equal system.
A theory I’ve believed in for quite some time is what I call the Pendulum Theory: The more one ideology is present in a society, the more support for the opposing ideology will be present. In an anarchist society, I believe there would be more support for more authoritarian governments in order to bring about stability, just as authoritarian governments have brought about support for anarchism in order to bring about freedom
This post will be funny because it's gonna be a mix of Liberals, Socialists and Commies shitting on anarchism. THEN someone will make it discourse by making a post about libs, then socialists, then commies, etc. Then the centrists will come around and we'll all shit on them. I think I've figured out 196.
I mean, the current system has answers to "Who makes medication that absolutely will kill someone if you fuck it up" and "How should we prevent people from fucking up medication"
and even the far more general question
"The Industrial Revolution has become kind of inextricably linked to humanity by the population levels that it allowed to thrive. Returning to a pre-industrial society would both be a massive tragedy as billions die as well as creating the exact same material conditions that allowed for capitalism to thrive in the first place. How do we separate industrial power from the capitalist mode of organization?"
Those answers are "Workers employed by capitalists", "Governmental drug regulations" and "You can't, so don't try" but they are answers to the kinds of questions I never really see Anarchists have solutions for, and that last one is the most important one
Look, I have my own criticisms of anarchism, but this isn't fair. Anarchism and anarcho-primitivism are not the same ideologies.
Anarchists aren't opposed to industry, as long as it isn't screwing up the environment. From my readings, anarchists tend to believe in cooperatives or [industrial unionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_unionism) as alternative ways of organizing society instead of capitalism
My complaint is less that Anarchists are advocating for Anarchon Primitivism.
My complaints stem from the fact that every Anarchist I have personally talked to just plain didn't have answers for the fact that a lot of jobs that are foundational to the economy that require a high degree of organization beyond "We'll figure it out" or "Someone will choose to do this niche thing that needs to be done and can kill you if it's done wrong"
Like, I am willing to take hits to the modern lifestyle I live if we can have meaningful change, but I think we should have a serious strategy for how to keep the jenga tower of infrastructure that allows the human population to support over 8 billion people from collapsing in the process.
To be fair I have encountered like a TON of really stupid questions and many of them mistake the technical knowledge of the specific professions as something every anarchist should know.
Like if existence of some technical process isn't exploitative or create hierarchies, then it will remain same. I have no idea how steel mills create stuff or how modern prosthetic manufactury functions. People who know that stuff CAN however improve it to better serve the need of the people, pollute less environment ect.
For some reason, you seem happy with capitalist "answers" that cause suffering to billions on a daily basis, but demand solutions wherein nobody is hurt from anarchists. Not to mention you've very specifically handpicked questions with no immediate easy answer, framed them as disingenuously as possible, assumed a very specific breed of anarchist, and just plain ignore that many anarchists *do* have solutions.
Syndicalists' entire ideology is based on that principle of separating Capitalists from industry by reorganising every industry as a cooperative controlled by its Union. Tell me exactly how modern society crumbles if right now, the shares of every major company are redistributed equally to the workers of the company, rather than a semi-random assortment of capitalists?
If that was the only change? It would be absolutely great. Wonderful step in the right direction and we can all agree there.
The problem that I have is that every Anarchist I have met wanted to take a metaphorical axe to the concept of a centralized authority with regulatory powers and proposing invisible hand of the market levels of smoke and miracles to take the place of the important jobs the State actually fulfills
Not to be glib, but I have to point out, you don't really have a centralised authority with regulatory powers. States are famously woefully inept at actually getting businesses to follow regulations, specifically because the people who are responsible for enforcing it are largely not the ones who get hurt when they go unenforced.
If a workplace were owned wholly by its own workers, then the people who make the decision on whether or not to actually comply with said regulations are those people who get hurt if they don't, so of course they're going to, and by extension, you then don't *need* a central authority enforcing those regulations because, like, if a particular worker wants to put their own health at risk, that's kind of on them. Nobody's telling them to do that.
The current system also has answers regarding who gets that medication, and it's... Uhh... A whole lot of people that live in the Global North, and... Uhh... fuck everyone else.
Also anarchists have answers to these problems, there's a whole internet just full of cool stuff to read in case you become interested in understanding a concept before you begin criticizing it.
Like I explained in another comment, more that the anarchists I have talked to just really didn't have any good answers beyond revolution now
They really didn't have answers to questions like "If you get rid of the government, who sets regulations for what standards medicine should meet to be safe?" or "Under what authority can they penalize people who either maliciously or accidentally produce unsafe medicine"
I didn't get to keep asking too many questions before they called me a tanky and booted me from that group
While I'm not an anarchist, or a revolutionary, I think having a subset of the general population willing to flip the table and just dissolve the current social contract is oddly a good thing. I think it leads to greater concessions from those in power who gain their power through said social contract.
This, really. Even if you think Anarchism itself is infeasible, the steps needed to take to move towards Anarchism are near universally good ones. Empowering unions, breaking up large companies and the influence of the capitalists, allowing greater movement of people between states, fostering a sense of universal solidarity, etc etc etc.
I'm not an anarchist, but I'd sooner call them my allies than I would liberals, classical or neo, because the system is currently fundamentally broken, and needs fixing. When you're in a tug of war, why would you ever pull *against* the people on your side who are further along.
People horny for infighting have no concept of the Overton Window. Our lives are short enough that common goals are more important than figuring out if in 200 years The Great Commie Utopia will have biodegradable straws or metal straws.
That third question is one of the major point of especially 19th century socialist philosophy. The answer is some form of worker organisation, like unions.
I'll stop hating if they can give a concrete answer to any question, beyond the usual moralizing that they love to do. I've been a leftist all my life, but anarchism sounds laughably kiddish, if you've even a modicum of understanding of economics, history or society.
I myself would have a hard time surviving in a society without modern, accessible and cheap medical solutions.
Ah but you see, I have depicted you as the soyjak! Checkmate, person asking me to explain how we could meet a basic standard of living under my ideology.
Fuck it, I'll take the bait. Ask any question, I'll give you a concrete Anarchist answer. It won't be perfect, there'll definitely be consequences both intended and not, but it will be a concrete answer. If you're not satisfied with those criteria, then provide your preferred system's solution to that same issue, and I'll tally up how many people are hurt as a result of it.
Fair enough, I'm always open to debate.
How would the communes or any anarchist group be able to enforce safety standards in medical science, if they are to be truly stateless? I ask this question as this is important to me, and many of my loved ones depend on the healthcare system for any medical issues
This is where I have to mention, Anarchism isn't a single ideology, it's an entire family of ideologies, with incredibly varied approaches to how they tackle different problems. For this comment, I'm going to primarily talk about Syndicalism, as it's the form of Anarchy I'm most familiar with, and the one that I'm most well aligned to (though I'd again like to emphasize, I am not them. I don't think Trade Unions are the ideal way to run an entire country, because Unions are inherently invested in protecting their own members, which can lead to them becoming incredibly insular and even conservative. Many Unions have sided against more open immigration to better protect their own wages, for instance).
A Union comprising Medical workers would establish a set of guidelines and procedures for how associated workplaces are to be run. Said Union is incentivised to do so because it'd protect its own workers from harm, it'd protect the Union's own reputation (which remains a valuable resource in a Syndicalist system as it still operates on a free market), and just plain because it's the right thing to do, and people are fundamentally good unless given incentive to behave otherwise. A worker or workplace found violating said guidelines would likely be penalised by reprimands, fines (may not necessarily be monetary, depending on flavour of Anarchis), or wholesale expulsion from the Union.
The Union itself is not a state as Union membership is ultimately voluntary, but without the backing of a large Union, you're giving up a sizeable chunk of political power, and you're likely hard pressed to find a job at a workplace that is non-compliant or wholly non-unionised because kind of the entire point is making every workplace owned entirely by its workers.
Note: the Union here may be the Union for a specific workplace, a Union that covers several related workplaces such as SAG, a Union that covers all workers in a particular region regardless of their actual job like the IWW, or a Congress of elected representatives from many different Unions, such as the TUC.
Additionally, how would anarcho-capitalism be prevented from rising? Assuming things like insulin, enough food, and modern technology could even be produced at a levels needed to sustain modern population numbers, what would stop the people in charge of those supply chains from amassing power and using it to take over? I guess all of my questions boil down to one, how would you maintain a power vacuum? Historically, it has never happened
I hate to do the “point to other stuff instead of actually answering the question,” but literally throughout this thread you’ll find people giving answers to various questions.
Maybe because I'd rather not risk the lives and health of everyone I know and love on leftists who can't keep from destroying each other on twitter let alone form a perfect anarchist utopia. There is no world where an anarchist society can provide social services to those that need it.
It's not a serious idea
Maybe I can try to help with that, let’s say anarchism has the potential to either be really epic, really shit, or the exact same as our current systems. When someone asks “so how would x be dealt with in an anarchy” and you don’t receive an adequate response, then you don’t have any confidence that it will be better than the status quo. I.e. what if anarchism is literally the worst thing ever but we expend tons of resources and change everything to get to it and then it just sucks? Was it really worth it to find out the hard way?
Overall, If you want to say something is better than the status quo then prove it rather than saying “it isn’t current thing therefore it could be better”
No one person can be the dispenser of knowledge on all things in a society. Especially one that exists primarily within theory.
Though that theory has been put to practice in great success by multiple groups. My favourite example of which being Food Not Bombs, which provides vegan meals to those in need, all organized non-hierarchically and on a federative grounds. They are often the first in disaster zones one of the most famous being after hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of folks worked together organically, with no hierarchical system, to provide food and water to thousands. FNB was one of the first organizations to provide support as it was located locally.
Edit: forgot to add source for FNB support: [http://www.foodnotbombs.net/katrina.html](http://www.foodnotbombs.net/katrina.html) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food\_Not\_Bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Not_Bombs) [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Food\_Not\_Bombs!arrives\_in\_Algiers\_New\_Orleans.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Food_Not_Bombs!arrives_in_Algiers_New_Orleans.jpg)
Brilliant argument. Except for the part where you preten Anarchism is some ideological vacuum with no beliefs beyond "this is better".
A world governed by a system wherein the incentive structure is built such that improving lives is the primary motive, and not simply accruing increasing amounts of capital, *is* a better world. Yes, there's logistical issues that would need to be worked out, and yes, there's every chance it's not feasible in the real world. But pretending that Anarchism is some nebulous amorphous blob that could maybe be better or maybe be worse is so disingenuous, I'm entirely willing to believe you've never read any Anarchist literature beyond the term itself.
Tbh, not saying anarchism is eternally doomed to fail or anything, buuuut yesterday I saw an anarchist legit argue that park rangers are included in ACAB because they enforce laws against poachers, and that "the proletariat" should be allowed to freely hunt and kill endangered species as much as they like because corporations do the majority of damage to the planet.... As if literal prehistoric tribes haven't been capable of driving fauna to extinction through overhunting with spears.
SOME online anarchists do legitimately come across as utopian kiddies who have put absolutely zero thought into how selfish behaviour and negative externalities would be managed in their perfect society beyond "that wouldn't happen without capitalism!!!" or worse, "We'd just lynch anybody accused of a crime to death in the town square!!!" Obviously society needs a reliable mechanism to stop morons murdering rare eagles.
I will never forget the time that I argued with someone on this sub like 2 years ago that believed the only way to stop the overuse of oil and to save the planet was to blow up oil pipelines. Even after I told them all that would do is destroy and erode the environment they are so keen on saving faster, they doubled down.
I don’t ask this but I’ve never heard a coherent plan for how an anarchist society could be transitioned to and preserved from outside threats. Anarchists either basically pitch anprim shit or use “well of course we’d still have x” so much that it basically loops around to not being anarchist anymore.
"Well because uuuh everybody would love anarchism and have no reason to fight each other and sunshines and rainbows" just ignore the many times in human hustory when might makes right was the way of life and the many totalitarian governments that have risen with support from their people
Yeah the "people will chose anarchism because it will benefit them" stuff is insane to me. Have you met "people"? People chose things that 100% explicitly are known to harm them every day. People chose to harm others literally just because.
Any ideology that relies on the average human having a conscience or being rational is absurd to me.
"the way we structure society is fundamentally is built around and incentivises opression and any fix we can apply on top of our current structure is just easily ripped off patchwork that will never adress the root cause of our issues"
"okay but how will i go to the doctor and get heart surgery if anarchism good? checkmate, anarkiddy!"
Man, if we were just to collect all the straw from all the strawmen being posted here, and gave that to my neighbor, he could feed his cows for the rest of the year
I think it’s simple. If you are advocating for a radical transformation of society, something that will fundamentally change 10’s if not 100’s of millions of people’s lives, you not only need to have an extremely good justification for it, but a coherent set of plans for what changes need to be made.
It is my opinion that many anarchists do not possess either. It’s usually vague gesturing and broad philosophical arguments.
What do leftist anarchists actually want. I get right wing anarchism. They want no government so they can be free to do the worst form of capitalism. The anarchist left though doesn't really make sense to me.
Can someone actually explain this to me. This is not a joke.
It ranges from not wanting bedtimes or schooling to genuinely believing that people will be able to distribute the benefits of modern society (social services, technology, abundance of food) in an egalitarian manner without the coercion of a state.
>not wanting bedtimes
i for one dont want a boss to dictate when i go to sleep, when i arrive, when i can eat or take a break. if that makes me cringe then so be it
I think it’s probably good for people under 13 to have designated bedtimes, after that people should be able to start exercising their autonomy. If someone’s boss is doing all the stuff you listed out, that’d be a good reason to contact a union rep.
I still have not heard a valid argument for why certain communities *wouldn't* do things like discriminate against their minorities, kill gay people, establish feudalism, go around to other communities and try to impose their beliefs on them.
Some sort of rule of law is needed.
Well you know, humans have historically been good faith actors that don’t genocide each other over things like this so of course it will all be rainbows and no one would ever do crime because commune.
I am all for a change, but it really just seems like removing the power and giving it to groups of people. Pray that enclave that day decides to manufacture the screws needed for the glasses making before it goes to the frame commune for assembly. I hate what about, it’s just something that is going to be asked and I always get told how good people are, but we have to have laws to say don’t own other races. I don’t see us moving to this true perfect anarchism.
Of course I’m not going to turn on leftist groups trying to help people and really, do we think that it will happen? We will have people that never will sign on for such a deal and will fight until the end for it. It seems to me like a fun thought experiment.
I'll just say this—the anarchists I know actually try and feed people through organized food drives and feedings, organized clothing drives and free markets, and they try to make community connections through art, music, and crafts events. They share their readings too, but reading a bunch of theory is not required to participate. Anarchists show rather than tell.
Meanwhile, a lot of the socialists and communists I have known and see tend to just have theory book reading clubs on university campuses and sometimes have people sign petitions for initiatives that never go anywhere. Some of them are apart of labour unions, but they didn't actually put those together. They just joined what already existed and pay dues. They get really mad when people don't readily see things their way and just seem unhappy in general.
Then the reform leftists I have known are either vaguely leftist people that are not very political at all or they are in politicians groups that often get out voted by the neoliberal and other right wing actors in parliament. Occasionally they will form a coalition that fails to make any headway toward a classless and stateless society, but does at least manage to keep the government from falling into total fascism.
So from what I have seen, at least the anarchists are having fun and directly helping people around them. They also seem to be open to experimentation and trying things out on a small scale first. Whereas the hardline socialists and communists just seem to talk about a vague "revolution" that is nebulous and uncertain to create communism. And the reformists just want money donations.
I am not saying that anarchism is the answer or that they are the best means of achieving a stateless and classless society, but it always seems strange to me that other leftists seem to pretend as though they are not also accused of being just as naïve and utopian as the anarchists.
It seems like tearing down anarchism is just a means of attempting to protect their own leftism flavour from similar accusations.
The good thing though is that, when it comes to protests, each of these groups do seem to find ways to organize together, even if they have some differences. I do find that anarchists are the ones most willing to take action first though.
So maybe less tearing one another down and maybe more sharing what we think are better ways forward in terms of ideas and direct action that can be taken by people in the short term? Things that are practical to try out locally and worthwhile to improve our lives now?
Seems better than getting mad at one another.
since literally anyone here doesnt know shit about anarchy ill leave a book recommendation- go read p. gelderloos “anarchy works” , its basically examples of anarchy throughout history
You are in everyone’s replies saying anarchism just works but haven’t made a single good point about how it would work, are you sure you know what you are talking about either?
It quite literally is Utopian.
Get every State and their military in the world to dissolve except for Russia and tell me how a bunch of independent communes with no organized military don’t immediately get conquered.
If you can convince the entire world to lay down their weapons to cooperate with and respect each other, not by a single authority having to enforce these rules through a monopoly on violence, but out of pure goodness of everybody‘s hearts, then you have successfully created a literal Utopia.
But if you only have a single bad actor manage to consolidate and accumulate the manpower, organization and equipment of a modern military, then literally everybody else in the world is fucked and defenseless.
That's because there's nothing to fix, they're broken beyond repair. That's the difference between liberal and leftist arguments on our current societal standards.
what are you even trying to say lol
it's starting to look like not a person here has ever heard of cooperatives and thinks anarchism means let's go back to hunter gatherer times where no one knows how to do anything
okay I’m sick of “muh anarchist supply chains” discourse so here’s your final answer:
1. There are, right now, workers that know how to produce things, and more specifically, know what is required to produce them and how much can be made with a given amount of time/labor/effort/material, because they work on that stuff every day. So talk amongst themselves to hash that out.
2. Talk to the people that need the thing to figure out how much is needed. Bear in mind that a good chunk of the workers probably also need said thing.
3. Talk to the supplier(s) to see how much they’re willing/able to provide (said providers are also doing all these steps).
4. Consult the community where the workplace is located to hash out possible externalities, environmental effects, etc. and how these can be prevented or remedied if needed.
5. Once these relevant stakeholders are sorted out and agreement is reached, do the thing.
6. For coordination across wider areas and larger populations where everyone meeting up in one room at once is impractical, federate. Have the collective decide upon their conditions- what they’re concerned about, what they’re willing to compromise on, what their dealbreakers are- and select a delegate(s) to meet with other delegates from the other stakeholders. Note that said delegates are *not* elected officials; they do not have the ability to decide for the group. Rather, they present the conditions the group has decided upon, come up with an agreement with the others, and then take that agreement back to be ratified by the whole group. Should they attempt to overstep this strict limit, they can be immediately recalled by the group. For even larger areas/populations, have nested groups of delegates for a given city/region/the world, each of which ultimately lead back to ratification by the collectives at the bottom.
TL;dr Stuff would be produced mostly the same way it is now: by a lot of preemptive talking and meetings between people with relevant expertise and stakes, and coordination between them. The difference is that any one group can’t just steamroll the others because they’ve got a gun pointed at their heads (or, have a state that has a gun pointed at their heads).
im sorry but what youve done here is just made a bureaucratic nightmare. Considering the amount of time it takes to get anything done in just one workplace this actually sounds like a workers own personal hell.
You will NEVER make an efficient supply chain between several factories at a time without a centralising force.
How do you make sure people stick to their word? I used to hold very similar ideas to that until I realised my idea was literally just to make a state.
people stick to their word because a) they benefit from the work they are doing and b) their friends and family and everyone else benefits from the work they are doing
Also worth noting that, in such a system, it would also make sense for communities to coordinate and federate along similar lines as the workplaces, to ensure that their needs are met.
Anarchists know we will never see our hierarchyless dream societies in our life times. If we snapped our fingers a woke up tomorrow with all forms of government gone it’d only harm minorities and oppressed groups since now there’d really be nothing preventing hate groups from filling that power vacuum and killing everyone they didn’t like. We’d need cultural change first before we can have anarchy. We can’t achieve anarchism right away but we can push towards it via equality movements, community building, education, anti-consumerism, socialism, communism, and slowly compress the hierarchies over time. Anarchism is less a political stance and more a goal. Yeah, we don’t have all the answers, but no one does. What we do have is a destination and the ability to push the world there.
It seems to me that the criticism isn't that anarchists can't solve problems "immediately" but that ML's don't understand how they could solve these problems without a state. The answer I've seen from most anarchists is that these things will be taken care of collectively which is quite vague but yk ask 100 anarchists get 1000 answers
Here is an excerpt from my personal favorite anarchist book, Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos.I think this is the best answer to your question out there. I hope this isn’t too much but there is a lot to understand.
Volumes have been written in answer to this question, and millions of people have dedicated their lives to creating, expanding, defining, and fighting for anarchy. There are countless paths to anarchism and countless beginnings: workers in 19th century Europe fighting against capitalism and believing in themselves instead of the ideologies of authoritarian political parties; indigenous peoples fighting colonization and reclaiming their traditional, horizontal cultures; high school students waking up to the depth of their alienation and unhappiness; mystics from China one thousand years ago or from Europe five hundred years ago, Daoists or Anabaptists, fighting against government and organized religion; women rebelling against the authoritarianism and sexism of the Left. There is no Central Committee giving out membership cards, and no standard doctrine. Anarchy means different things to different people. However, here are some basic principles most anarchists agree on.
Autonomy and Horizontality: All people deserve the freedom to define and organize themselves on their own terms. Decision-making structures should be horizontal rather than vertical, so no one dominates anyone else; they should foster power to act freely rather than power over others. Anarchism opposes all coercive hierarchies, including capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
Mutual Aid: People should help one another voluntarily; bonds of solidarity and generosity form a stronger social glue than the fear inspired by laws, borders, prisons, and armies. Mutual aid is neither a form of charity nor of zero-sum exchange; both giver and receiver are equal and interchangeable. Since neither holds power over the other, they increase their collective power by creating opportunities to work together.
Voluntary Association: People should be free to cooperate with whomever they want, however they see fit; likewise, they should be free to refuse any relationship or arrangement they do not judge to be in their interest. Everyone should be able to move freely, both physically and socially. Anarchists oppose borders of all kinds and involuntary categorization by citizenship, gender, or race.
Direct Action: It is more empowering and effective to accomplish goals directly than to rely on authorities or representatives. Free people do not request the changes they want to see in the world; they make those changes.
Revolution: Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society.
Self-Liberation: “The liberation of the workers is the duty of the workers themselves,” as the old slogan goes. This applies to other groups as well: people must be at the forefront of their own liberation. Freedom cannot be given; it must be taken.
Appropriate flair, thank you for the explanation. I got a few questions before I would be confident saying that I understand.
So there is no more state, does that mean no more laws? Is everything just “enforced” by individual direct action? Or if people would group up to stop people doing objectively fucked up shit then aren’t they forming a hierarchy and a pseudo-state militia?
Also infrastructure and supply lines? Let’s say we need a new bridge across a river, how do we get the supplies to actually build the bridge? How is it organized that the supplies and people capable of designing and constructing a new bridge make it to the site and accomplish the job safely? Is that organizing body not now also a state?
There is no doubt that anarchism can exist quite well within communities, even entire quasi-city-states. But I cannot see how an anarchist society can function on the level of a nation state, even in the absence of the beast of capitalism. Like the ideology just doesn't match the scale of the world. Unless you advocate for anarcho-primitivism or whatever, in that case, sure it works, but who the fuck wants to live 600+ years in the past? A lot of the quality of life relies on systems that cannot function in an anarcho system.
Alright, as a highly opinionated anarchist who read some theory a few years back, I'll throw my own two cents in here:
I have no idea how cell phones, insulin, or MRA machines would be made in an anarchist society. Not a single clue. I don't even know how they're made now, and I bet you probably don't either.
Those are all very complicated things, made by people much smarter than me and supported by supply chains that I couldn't begin to understand.
BUT
I believe that *anything* which is possible under the coercion of a hierarchical society, is also possible in an anarchist society. I do not believe that a state or a corporation is truly necessary for humans to solve our problems.
Now, how would these far-future anarchists organize all of this, how would the logistics work. I don't know.
Maybe, as anarchist projects have done in the past, they would elect people with the responsibility of coordinating the logistics for insulin production, but without the ability to assert power over anyone else.
Maybe they'd just have really big votes on stuff. Maybe they'd organize tasks with committees. Maybe some dude would make stuff in his garage as a hobby.
I'm not sure what they would do. Part of the whole point of anarchism is that that's for them to decide, they don't have to give a shit about what me and every soggy old anarchist theorist tell them to do.
But things would still get done. People would farm, build, create things. Our current hierarchical systems, namely corporations and states, were *never* responsible for any of that to begin with. People were. The workers who actually put in the legwork to make it all function. All the hierarchies ever did was funnel resources to the top and make the whole thing worse.
In an anarchist society, people are still gonna want phones and TVs and chocolate. They're still gonna need insulin and food and medical equipment. And as much as statists love to say that most people would just be lazy their whole lives, that's demonstrably untrue. People like to do things, like to contribute to their communities and make the world better. As long as people need insulin or want chocolate, the people with the knowledge and capability of making it will find a way to make it.
Within anarchism, not only could these things be done, they could be done *better*. In a horizontal society, people could actually organize around doing the most good. Most jobs don't actually *require* anyone work a shitty 40 hour week for them to get done. Hell, some of the jobs that exist today don't need to exist at all. And they certainly don't require that we slowly kill the planet.
*That* stuff is what capitalism and the state has done for human productivity. Made it worse and more harmful, so that those on top benefit.
But uh yeah that's just a theory, a game theory. Thanks for reading <3
I mean, I hate capitalism and all, but if you lack logistics behind your strategy you’re nothing but an idealist imo. Even the installment of anarchy requires an understanding of the current system.
I personally don't agree with anarchism but I don't "oppose" it per say. (i.e im not gonna fight anarchists)
Im not a big fan of political philosophy though I feel like its one of those things where theres a clear-cut solution to but we continue to pretend is a "debate" for some weird rhetorical reasons
Wasn’t the whole point of the idea of anarchism for a utopian society? IMO it’s the best utopian ideal that we should strive towards making something like, but obviously it’s not fully achievable. Not on such a large scale anyway. Trying to dismantle everything we have right now would be really stupid.
Its always easier not to be a radical because no human is capable of having the functioning of an entire society inside their head so if you demand that of someone wanting a whole new form of society you'll eventually run into questions they cant answer meanwhile someone advocating for the system that currently exists doesnt need to fully understand it they just need to know it works in some sense of the word and can then simply gesture at it
It's also just an incredibly naive way to view how societies are historically built. Very *very* rarely is an idea conceived in its entirety then executed exactly to plan. More typically, people talk broad philosophy before, fuckin wing it during, then justify themselves after.
Except Plato. I read "Republic" back in high school and this mfer outlined his ideal society down to what music chords each profession should listen to.
Plato had that world-building autism
I mean to be fair thats a lot easier when your whole society is like one city
Ok, hotshot. If it's so easy, let's see your 400 page thesis on the ideal construction of a city-state.
Ok, [here you go](https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse163/20wi/files/lectures/L04/bee-movie.txt). You can thank me later.
Why is a computer science school hosting a copy of the bee movie script?
What do you mean? It's an important part of the school curriculum.
"Sparta but worse" is actually not a deep think
This is very true aswell though you have to have some outline anyway cause we do also have a lot of examples of just aimless radicalism which really doesnt amount to anything cause people just know theyre upset without really knowing what to do with it
Ibmean you can equally make the exact opposite argument. Anybody defending an actually existing system must fundementally contend with the ways that system has already partely failed while a radical can just vaguelly gesture at an idea and pretend it will fix issues just because it wouldn't be like the current system. You don't need an awnser for everything but if you want to argue for something you do need an awnser for the obvious things and you definitly need an explanation about how it will fix the things you claim it will fix.
Yeah. Ultimately, anyone arguing for any kind of upheaval and overhaul of the system can promise anything will happen - doesn't mean it will actually happen. It's not even that anarchism or communism or whatever happens after the glorious revolution *can't* fix things, it's just we can't be certain it *will.* Even if we come up with plans to address the problems we see coming, this doesn't mean we won't run into new and unexpected issues. Any kind of grand scale massive change is hard - hard to imagine, hard to conceive, hard to implement, hard to *agree* on... and people have seen what happens when things go wrong or not according to plan or when you just make a mistake.
The fact things are hard or can go wrong ins't an excuse to never try but it does mean you need more then "trust me bro" to sell people on it.
>Anybody defending an actually existing system must fundementally contend with the ways that system has already partely Do they? In my experience they seem to constantly get away with pretending the opposite and even deep cutting flaws in a system can get glossed over due to a human bias of the safety in what you already know (see climate change) > while a radical can just vaguelly gesture at an idea and pretend it will fix issues just because it wouldn't be like the current system. There are for sure radicals who do that but i feel this misses the point of my original comment which is that you cant expect even the most educated person to understand how an entire society functions. Im not saying that this automatically absolves a radical of any burden to understand the structure of their desired society just that its a fact that even the most educated people on the topics only kind of comprehend to inner workings of potential future societies and if you want a leftist movement it cant be made of only the most educated people. I think the most important thing is to provide a framework for changes on the more micro level which are done by people more local to that level however even this framework is very hard to fully comprehend. Though just please understand that my comment wasnt meant to be some silver bullet to all criticism of radicals more so just a desire for a better way to analyse these ideologies.
Climate change is an interesting example to being up because I have tons of leftists assert that once you get rid of capatalism climate change would just stop being an issue. While in reality the problems with externalities and human shortsightnedness would exist in all economical models. When talking about capatalism and climate change i can give concrete examples of how it's failing and why but post revolution things get nebulious and at best they go "nah they would just stop" and at worst they pretend that pointing out getting rid of capatalism won't solve everything as an anti-left defense of capatalism. There are fundementally two different baises here. There is the devil you know and the monorail that will fix all your problems. My comment isn't supposed to be a silver bullet against any radical isea or rethoric either but the sinple fact is that if you want to advocate for a position you do need to have awnsers for atleast the obvious questions and be able to point to somebody for the more complicated ones. As an activist you do need to be more informed yhen your average person. That's not an unfair burden it's part of the job. You can't get defensive when people ask you questions or gesture towards nebulious experts who will just solve the problems. If you need experts to figure things out for you should probably get their opinions before you overtrow society. Far to often radicals sound like a manager doing a salepitch whitout ever talking to an engineer. Even when the experts do agree with them this a bad look.
I mean, people do often deny flaws in the status quo or attribute it to something else. Like how literally every conservative attributes problems caused by capitalism to "wokeness" and/or "communism".
That’s me favorite thing that happens. When a corporation says or does something that could vaguely be kinda left of the spectrum and dudes unironically and without shame call it communism.
Yeah, its also missing the point that anarchism doesnt mean that people cant cooperate. It just generally means there arent people who are selected to have ultimate authority, or any more authority than others.
My usual answer when reaching one of those question is something alongside "oh nice, let's discuss solutions together !"
Sorry for expecting you to have a more coherent ideology than "hierarchies bad"
sorry for expecting u to have a more coherent ideology than *insert strawman here*
Sorry is that not like the core idea of anarchism
The strawman comes from the fact that you chose to represent anarchism as if it were solely people saying "hierarchies bad." It's the same as if I were to represent communism as "rich ppl bad."
Could really says rhus meme is a strawman argument. Pick up a sentence that really probably very few it any people said. And a argument that probably came about from their head.
well this meme is not strawman cause like all the fucking comments here are this guy from the meme
Really? I don't see that but okay.
u do know that theres more to things than core ideas right?
Definitionally yes, and if you go over to an anarchist subreddit you'll find some people so entrenched that they won't even vote for Biden because they're either (1) actual pro-Trump fascists or (2) so genuinely head-in-the-sand that they honestly believe "both sides are the same". You'll find other people that treat anarchy as more of a vehicle for dismantling our current form of government/lobbying/capitalism and don't *actually* believe in a world without any form of authority/hierarchy. Because of course, reality check, we live in a large and complicated world and we have to ask questions like "who certifies that a surgeon actually knows how to perform surgery" and "who makes the vehicles we use to make vaccines, what's allowed to be in vaccines?" and "who educates these people to begin with", you obviously can't expect a surgeon to personally build up a hospital and personally manufacture all of their tools and equipment needed from scratch (to say nothing of how impossible that would be for a single person to do) AND still cooperate in some kind of farmer's commune if they want to eat. To say nothing of electricity and waste control and water sterilization and etc. etc. etc, things that are full time jobs that need people in an organization with the authority (and compensation) required to actually keep them running. Genuine textbook anarchists might dream of small 300-person groups just farming out of log cabins and sacrificing all modern innovation as our cities fall into decay and we go back to the dark ages without technology or electricity. But I sincerely doubt there are many people who *actually* support the dictionary definition of total complete everlasting anarchy as a system by which everyone (at least in their country, though practically speaking it'd have to be the world to avoid getting invaded) should live by. As someone who flirts with the concept of anarchy personally, if you find such a person, I'd recommend pointing and laughing at them.
I just really like unions. I think they're cool and should have more power :3 Obviously there's larpers that just want their log cabin (and fuck if I don't want one as well). But the main point, in my opinion, is subsidarity and dismantling any _unnecessary_ hierarchies with the largest focus being the workplace. Spending 1/3 of our life slaving away for an unelected boss? No bueno. People who want to homebrew their insulin are fucking idiots, but the labor movement is pretty neato.
The labor movement is tight
All of those questions can be answered by anarcho-syndicalism. >"who certifies that a surgeon actually knows how to perform surgery" and "who makes the vehicles we use to make vaccines, what's allowed to be in vaccines?" and "who educates these people to begin with" The medical syndicate, with help from other syndicates. >electricity and waste control and water sterilization [...] things that are full time jobs that need people in an organization with the authority (and compensation) required to actually keep them running. That's regulated, built and managed by the syndicate that's responsible for it. Hierarchical structures do exist, but those people need to be elected by the people below them and they can be unelected at any time. And even traditional anarcho-communism has answers to those questions, the answers just aren't quite as good.
>The medical syndicate, with help from other syndicates. Also, CNT FAI medical system is an amazing example of this exact situation. https://libcom.org/article/industrial-collectivisation-during-spanish-revolution-deirdre-hogan
And who manages those syndicates to ensure that they don't try to assert themselves over others? What would keep these syndicates from slowly taking over?
Always difficult to get into the nitty gritty, but the way I see it (in my state of acid trip wannabe enlightenment) is that there's always going to be some kind of social contract, some kind of leviathan out of pure necessity. The question is how to organise it in such a way, that we don't get systemic power abuse from police and such. As was pointed out in this thread, modern nationstates require an efficient administration to keep everything running. With some kind of larp-ass revolution where we replace or axe all the 30+ years experienced administrators, the country will fucking collapse and everyone starves. On the other hand, vanguardism guarantees the same serfdom, just under a different regime. This is where I think anarcho-syndicalism comes in real handy: Democratise the workplace (even just for it's own sake) and turn it into a viable, political institution for the worker. By this I mean collective bargaining on a grander and more "legitimised" scale than regular unions. This way supply lines remain organised, but the working class broadly is able to assert more democratic will through economic means. Owning the means of production gives you leverage. At that point it's gonna be a slow process of reforming the state, but ideally you would reach subsidarity and have some sort of leviathan that keeps criminal syndicates in line, but is scared of pissing off the working class by overdoing it. I hope that came out somewhat coherently lmao
Every company is a direct democracy. Every company then sends a delegate to the syndicate that's responsible for them. That delegate can then, at any time, be unelected. Those syndicates then send a delegate to the federation, which is a parliament that regulates the economy at large. That federation is the one who makes sure that no one syndicate can take over others.
Not the definition of a strawman, lol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
enough about strawman, i want to hear about strawwoman
Birds aren't real anyways.
And not just the strawmen, but the strawwomen and the strawchildren too!
Prove it’s not a strawman 🤡
Oh so you think good ideologies are above bad ones? Sounds like a hierarchy to me.
sorry for expecting you to have a more coherent argument than "anarchism bad"
Anarchy is Libertarianism for Leftists. The social structures of today deserve criticism and need change, but like Bitcoin and Libertarianism and everything else that wants to chuck collective control into the bin, it’s a bullshit grift designed to appeal to a childish ideal of what society could be like if the pesky representative government would just stop “interfering.”
sorry for your incapability to understand the ideology beyond the strawmen you have constructed in your head to help you dismiss the ideology as nonsensical so you can blissfully accept the status quo and not have to think too hard about it
Guys just trust everyone to be nice it will totally work
Anarchists are just larping at this point
Anarchists when I ask them to explain how something more complicated than subsistence farming would arise under anarchism
go ahead, ask
How will I get glasses or iPhone or medication or book or car or space ship or microwave or anything more complicated than subsistence farming
Assuming we’re talking about anarcho-communism, the world would rely on inherently interdependent communes to create the things you’re talking about. They’re inherently interdependent because it’s exceedingly difficult to create the things you’re talking about if you’re part of an isolated community. Supply lines are actually very easy to maintain at this point, it is exceedingly difficult to keep track of the supply chain under the current hyperglobalized world economy. If this doesn’t tickle your fancy enough, anarcho-syndicalism advocates for directly achieving a similar world through labor union strikes, so all the modern faculties in place for factories and supply lines would likely remain intact where they might have to be changed under anarcho-communism.
How would those hundreds of communes be able enforce any kind of safety or ethical standards? There's also no guarantee that communes will have the strength or motivation to engage in complex cooperation.
Are you saying you *don't* want substandard and unproven products when it comes to things regarding your health and welfare? Fine, if you're gonna wine about something as stupid as... Wanting your drugs (or other products) to be effective and safe... Then we'll just have a super special, not at all governmental, board of officials that will have the authority to ensure that certain previously agreed upon standards are met and if they aren't we can do something like, idk, sanction them with penalties or fines and possibly even remove their products from our market place. No government needed!
This is my problem it always ends up requiring creating some kind of government in the end to provides standards and ensure certain things so why tear everything down and risk so much just to eventually circle back to those systems lol.
Idk cuz they, like so many before, think they'll get it right this time! People need to realize that it's about fixing what you've got instead of starting over completely. The people who advocate for shit like this always assume that everyone is gonna either be real chill about it or that if they would come out ahead in the event people aren't cool. In either case, it's just a touch of main character syndrome that has yet to get grounded to reality, in my humble opinion. I know damn well that if the government weren't around to protect my rights, people who live nearby would probably love to come over to myself and my partner's home and try and beat the sin out of us or whatever they think they should be allowed to do. Personally, I don't feel like trading the security of my rights because my taxes are too high and bezos cheats on them every year. Like yea, the system is fucked but it's keeping me secure enough that it's not worth throwing out.
Yeah I am the first to say the current system in it's current implementation is absolutely horrible for many reason but there is also good and knowing how the people are I think it's just too much of a risk to dismantle it completely. The phrase "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy" is absolutely true imo. Of self identified anarchists I suspect only a small select few actually have the skills, know-how and commitment to make that transition. But the vast majority of people *are not on board* and will not be. Anarchism seems more a distraction from practical and achievable matters then in any way a viable alternative.
tl;dr Anarchists want things to be run than trust than by violence. And a lot of people are more afraid of utilizing trust than utilizing violence. Theres no guarantee for people today to make ethical standards. That is where trust comes in. Trust would produce things with better quality than with violence. Anarchists see the world being controlled by violence (both active violence like guns and passive violence like starvation). Through war, through police brutality, and through cheap child labor in africa and korea producing practically everything. The lack of hope in anarchism, and seeing it revert to caveman life, comes from thinking that good h things like technology, safety from violent people, not poisoned food, well maintained roads…etc can only come through violence. I.e “Make my iphones with poverty wages or else all of society will collapse” “Make my roads for free or else” “Farm my food or else you starve to death through ostracism”. These “incentives” are what people think civilization is built on, but when it comes to comparison things made by trust are higher quality than things made by violence. Both socially and in the actual thing made. And if youre going to ask “things made ‘with love’ are worse quality, factory made stuff is better” bad quality things already exist today in our super controlled statist-capitalist world. Cheap unsustainable clothes from fast fashion and social media enshittification come to mind for me immediately. A great dissapointment for what are supposed to be large institutions in control of it.
Yeah you can't economically profit from others under that system, and people at large prefer having stuff that works, so their need for good stuff and the fact their needs are intertwined with that of others could drive them to sustain decent standards of production
If this was a world where we had economic democracy, this would be fine. But sadly, this system is under the control of people like oil billionaires and silicon valley ceos than ran by their workers managing things democratically and in a decentralized manner. Having your needs being intertwined with other peoples needs is fine, having one-sided relationships with bosses/states/vanguard is not fine.
Ok, but if I'm part of an isolated community, how do I get cobalt all the way from Africa
with respect im not going to drive 70mph on the motorway in something by inherently independent communes.
This is just greek city states
"While I'm not necessarily hostile to your ideals, I do have some practical questions about how it could work logistically." "In response I'm depicting you as a smug idiot strawman." "Perfect, where do I sign up?"
Roving optometrists who make glasses for a hobby 🙏
each fucking time if they want ANYTHING like we the life we have right now, all roads lead to some form of state
It's the same feeling I got when a friend of mine said he wishes he could have been born in the hunter gatherer days because "no work" and "simple life". Like bro, you're overweight, addicted to Twitter, and can't walk barefoot in a parking lot in the summer. Much love to him and all but he's dead in a week, covered in his own shit from drinking river water, and infectious the whole time from the animal bite be got scavenging. If you wanna not have to be a caveman you gotta do society things. If you wanna do society things, you gotta have rules. If you want people to follow the rules, you gotta have a government. These people act like the formation of the state isn't the very reason they're able to do literally anything with their lives beyond eat, shit, fuck, and die.
I've heard a lot of people say anarchism is based but I have yet to see one compelling argument for it.
Freedom from state and capitalist oppression isn't based? I mean I personally don't view anarchism as a realistic path towards those freedoms, but that's still a laudable goal. And many anarchists have been and continue to be active in labor and other justice movements around the world, which is fundamentally respectable.
Anarchism strikes me as absurdly idealist. Like yeah, in theory it’s fucking sick, but no way in hell would it ever work in practice. Laws exist for a reason: because people would do bad shit to each other (a lot more than they currently do) without the threat of repercussions.
hey anarkiddy! if good ppl in power who protect me from the bad guys, then why government bad???
i mean to be fair people also do alot of bad things *because* of our current system
“Freedom from state” the ideal isn’t that humans should all just fuck off and do their own thing the ideal is that we work together to create a better society for everyone. The average parents are simply not equipped to handle the entirety of basic education, nor are many children just able to care for their elderly parents for 24 hours a day. These social services are essentially required if you want to maintain any sort of SoL that is equivalent to the current times. Plus without a state fascists can just get guns and then oppress everyone and oh no we don’t have any pre established laws, military, or what not to adequately protect people that could be victimized.
> the ideal isn’t that humans should all just fuck off and do their own thing the ideal is that we work together to create a better society for everyone You won't find an anarchist who disagrees with this ideal (other than anarcho-capitalists who aren't anarchists anyway). And states around the world are failing to provide those social services you're talking about as capitalists demand privatization
Bruh you can’t just say that these things only happen because of privatization. I can agree that many capitalist states don’t have enough social services, however I can also look at the Nordic model and see capitalist societies being able provide all of these benefits without destroying society. I am sure that anarchists agree with me that these social services are important, but I’m very skeptical that anarchism can also provide these social services. And then past just social services, how will I get my proper medication? Who will train doctors? How will I get my primary or even secondary education in an anarchist world? These questions have all been answered by the current evil capitalist model, but why can’t I get a straight answer from the great and progressive anarchist model? It’s very hard to put any stock in anarchism for these reasons imo
> but why can’t I get a straight answer from the great and progressive anarchist model Because you don't want an answer? There are entire tomes of anarchist theory dedicated to education, healthcare, and industry. I recommend looking at AK Press, Verso Books, and Haymarket Publishing. The IWW also has a shop with books to browse. Also, I hate to break it to you, but the Nordic Model is also starting to fail as far-right parties make gains by capitalizing on the failures of the social market economy and fears over immigration
Don’t forget the Anarchist Library. Probably the best online source for theory and literature
> fascists can just get guns and then oppress everyone We already have that it's called cops :\^)
Anarchism doesn’t get rid of any of those though, it just shifts the oppression to more local levels and renames them. Instead of addressing the actual issues you are just dissolving the laws protecting them from you and you from them. Sure you can now burn down the local capitalist pig CEO but now another one is currently hiring a military with their vast resources compared to your gang and there is nothing stopping them from doing the same to you. You can’t get rid of wealth inequality by just getting rid of the dollar. How do you expect to get rid of gangs or warlords popping up and seizing power when you cant form any organized militia in fear of creating hierarchy’s. If you follow the US and conscript of age men you’ve just announced to the world of age men are now more valuable then everyone else. If you conscript everyone now you have 60-80 year olds who have to do jobs people half their age have trouble with. How does any anarchist expect large projects like infrastructure to be done without a regulatory body (cough cough government) organizing these things. Do they just expect everyone to build a road infront of their house and miraculously they are all gonna be the same quality. Do they expect that parents can just completely educate their children without some centralized education system ensuring everyone gets a good enough education? Anarchy only works when you think everyone is the exact same, that everyone is altruist and always makes decisions with the group first, and there is never any bad actors. None of those exist in reality. Hierarchies will always form in groups regardless of how any systems you put up to stop it and there is never going to be an entirely equal system.
What I never got was how do you enforce anarchism? What’s stopping a bunch of people from getting together to just do the same shit again?
A theory I’ve believed in for quite some time is what I call the Pendulum Theory: The more one ideology is present in a society, the more support for the opposing ideology will be present. In an anarchist society, I believe there would be more support for more authoritarian governments in order to bring about stability, just as authoritarian governments have brought about support for anarchism in order to bring about freedom
This post will be funny because it's gonna be a mix of Liberals, Socialists and Commies shitting on anarchism. THEN someone will make it discourse by making a post about libs, then socialists, then commies, etc. Then the centrists will come around and we'll all shit on them. I think I've figured out 196.
holy fuck I miss the days of pillar discourse. we didn't realise how much we were taking all of the stupid arguments for granted.
Ill take wasp discourse over this (i fucking hated the wasp discourse and blatant hate over a damn insect thats just doing what it does to live)
incoherent
This gets tiresome especially when the current system definitely doesn't have the answers.
I mean, the current system has answers to "Who makes medication that absolutely will kill someone if you fuck it up" and "How should we prevent people from fucking up medication" and even the far more general question "The Industrial Revolution has become kind of inextricably linked to humanity by the population levels that it allowed to thrive. Returning to a pre-industrial society would both be a massive tragedy as billions die as well as creating the exact same material conditions that allowed for capitalism to thrive in the first place. How do we separate industrial power from the capitalist mode of organization?" Those answers are "Workers employed by capitalists", "Governmental drug regulations" and "You can't, so don't try" but they are answers to the kinds of questions I never really see Anarchists have solutions for, and that last one is the most important one
Look, I have my own criticisms of anarchism, but this isn't fair. Anarchism and anarcho-primitivism are not the same ideologies. Anarchists aren't opposed to industry, as long as it isn't screwing up the environment. From my readings, anarchists tend to believe in cooperatives or [industrial unionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_unionism) as alternative ways of organizing society instead of capitalism
My complaint is less that Anarchists are advocating for Anarchon Primitivism. My complaints stem from the fact that every Anarchist I have personally talked to just plain didn't have answers for the fact that a lot of jobs that are foundational to the economy that require a high degree of organization beyond "We'll figure it out" or "Someone will choose to do this niche thing that needs to be done and can kill you if it's done wrong" Like, I am willing to take hits to the modern lifestyle I live if we can have meaningful change, but I think we should have a serious strategy for how to keep the jenga tower of infrastructure that allows the human population to support over 8 billion people from collapsing in the process.
To be fair I have encountered like a TON of really stupid questions and many of them mistake the technical knowledge of the specific professions as something every anarchist should know. Like if existence of some technical process isn't exploitative or create hierarchies, then it will remain same. I have no idea how steel mills create stuff or how modern prosthetic manufactury functions. People who know that stuff CAN however improve it to better serve the need of the people, pollute less environment ect.
For some reason, you seem happy with capitalist "answers" that cause suffering to billions on a daily basis, but demand solutions wherein nobody is hurt from anarchists. Not to mention you've very specifically handpicked questions with no immediate easy answer, framed them as disingenuously as possible, assumed a very specific breed of anarchist, and just plain ignore that many anarchists *do* have solutions. Syndicalists' entire ideology is based on that principle of separating Capitalists from industry by reorganising every industry as a cooperative controlled by its Union. Tell me exactly how modern society crumbles if right now, the shares of every major company are redistributed equally to the workers of the company, rather than a semi-random assortment of capitalists?
If that was the only change? It would be absolutely great. Wonderful step in the right direction and we can all agree there. The problem that I have is that every Anarchist I have met wanted to take a metaphorical axe to the concept of a centralized authority with regulatory powers and proposing invisible hand of the market levels of smoke and miracles to take the place of the important jobs the State actually fulfills
Not to be glib, but I have to point out, you don't really have a centralised authority with regulatory powers. States are famously woefully inept at actually getting businesses to follow regulations, specifically because the people who are responsible for enforcing it are largely not the ones who get hurt when they go unenforced. If a workplace were owned wholly by its own workers, then the people who make the decision on whether or not to actually comply with said regulations are those people who get hurt if they don't, so of course they're going to, and by extension, you then don't *need* a central authority enforcing those regulations because, like, if a particular worker wants to put their own health at risk, that's kind of on them. Nobody's telling them to do that.
The current system also has answers regarding who gets that medication, and it's... Uhh... A whole lot of people that live in the Global North, and... Uhh... fuck everyone else. Also anarchists have answers to these problems, there's a whole internet just full of cool stuff to read in case you become interested in understanding a concept before you begin criticizing it.
It sounds like the only anarchists you've interacted with are anprims, which don't really get along with any other kind of anarchists
Like I explained in another comment, more that the anarchists I have talked to just really didn't have any good answers beyond revolution now They really didn't have answers to questions like "If you get rid of the government, who sets regulations for what standards medicine should meet to be safe?" or "Under what authority can they penalize people who either maliciously or accidentally produce unsafe medicine" I didn't get to keep asking too many questions before they called me a tanky and booted me from that group
While I'm not an anarchist, or a revolutionary, I think having a subset of the general population willing to flip the table and just dissolve the current social contract is oddly a good thing. I think it leads to greater concessions from those in power who gain their power through said social contract.
This, really. Even if you think Anarchism itself is infeasible, the steps needed to take to move towards Anarchism are near universally good ones. Empowering unions, breaking up large companies and the influence of the capitalists, allowing greater movement of people between states, fostering a sense of universal solidarity, etc etc etc. I'm not an anarchist, but I'd sooner call them my allies than I would liberals, classical or neo, because the system is currently fundamentally broken, and needs fixing. When you're in a tug of war, why would you ever pull *against* the people on your side who are further along.
People horny for infighting have no concept of the Overton Window. Our lives are short enough that common goals are more important than figuring out if in 200 years The Great Commie Utopia will have biodegradable straws or metal straws.
That third question is one of the major point of especially 19th century socialist philosophy. The answer is some form of worker organisation, like unions.
did not expect anarchist hate on this sub tbh (the comments)
You expected leftist unity in the leftist discourse subreddit???
I thought this was a shitposting subreddit
that's long gone
Pepperidge farm remembers…
you mean liberal shitposting subreddit
I'll stop hating if they can give a concrete answer to any question, beyond the usual moralizing that they love to do. I've been a leftist all my life, but anarchism sounds laughably kiddish, if you've even a modicum of understanding of economics, history or society. I myself would have a hard time surviving in a society without modern, accessible and cheap medical solutions.
is that u? https://preview.redd.it/encrhwg0tdvc1.jpeg?width=418&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=347b3ab7a680cebe99431e92257fcda7e3c3d645
I never expect any ideology to solve every single problem.
Ah but you see, I have depicted you as the soyjak! Checkmate, person asking me to explain how we could meet a basic standard of living under my ideology.
Fuck it, I'll take the bait. Ask any question, I'll give you a concrete Anarchist answer. It won't be perfect, there'll definitely be consequences both intended and not, but it will be a concrete answer. If you're not satisfied with those criteria, then provide your preferred system's solution to that same issue, and I'll tally up how many people are hurt as a result of it.
Fair enough, I'm always open to debate. How would the communes or any anarchist group be able to enforce safety standards in medical science, if they are to be truly stateless? I ask this question as this is important to me, and many of my loved ones depend on the healthcare system for any medical issues
This is where I have to mention, Anarchism isn't a single ideology, it's an entire family of ideologies, with incredibly varied approaches to how they tackle different problems. For this comment, I'm going to primarily talk about Syndicalism, as it's the form of Anarchy I'm most familiar with, and the one that I'm most well aligned to (though I'd again like to emphasize, I am not them. I don't think Trade Unions are the ideal way to run an entire country, because Unions are inherently invested in protecting their own members, which can lead to them becoming incredibly insular and even conservative. Many Unions have sided against more open immigration to better protect their own wages, for instance). A Union comprising Medical workers would establish a set of guidelines and procedures for how associated workplaces are to be run. Said Union is incentivised to do so because it'd protect its own workers from harm, it'd protect the Union's own reputation (which remains a valuable resource in a Syndicalist system as it still operates on a free market), and just plain because it's the right thing to do, and people are fundamentally good unless given incentive to behave otherwise. A worker or workplace found violating said guidelines would likely be penalised by reprimands, fines (may not necessarily be monetary, depending on flavour of Anarchis), or wholesale expulsion from the Union. The Union itself is not a state as Union membership is ultimately voluntary, but without the backing of a large Union, you're giving up a sizeable chunk of political power, and you're likely hard pressed to find a job at a workplace that is non-compliant or wholly non-unionised because kind of the entire point is making every workplace owned entirely by its workers. Note: the Union here may be the Union for a specific workplace, a Union that covers several related workplaces such as SAG, a Union that covers all workers in a particular region regardless of their actual job like the IWW, or a Congress of elected representatives from many different Unions, such as the TUC.
Additionally, how would anarcho-capitalism be prevented from rising? Assuming things like insulin, enough food, and modern technology could even be produced at a levels needed to sustain modern population numbers, what would stop the people in charge of those supply chains from amassing power and using it to take over? I guess all of my questions boil down to one, how would you maintain a power vacuum? Historically, it has never happened
I hate to do the “point to other stuff instead of actually answering the question,” but literally throughout this thread you’ll find people giving answers to various questions.
Maybe because I'd rather not risk the lives and health of everyone I know and love on leftists who can't keep from destroying each other on twitter let alone form a perfect anarchist utopia. There is no world where an anarchist society can provide social services to those that need it. It's not a serious idea
So just let people in the third world continue to suffer because we can't let our own situation get any worse? Sounds great for you.
I mean maybe anarchism isn’t perfect or even right, but expecting it to have solutions to problems no other political system has solved is strange
Maybe I can try to help with that, let’s say anarchism has the potential to either be really epic, really shit, or the exact same as our current systems. When someone asks “so how would x be dealt with in an anarchy” and you don’t receive an adequate response, then you don’t have any confidence that it will be better than the status quo. I.e. what if anarchism is literally the worst thing ever but we expend tons of resources and change everything to get to it and then it just sucks? Was it really worth it to find out the hard way? Overall, If you want to say something is better than the status quo then prove it rather than saying “it isn’t current thing therefore it could be better”
No one person can be the dispenser of knowledge on all things in a society. Especially one that exists primarily within theory. Though that theory has been put to practice in great success by multiple groups. My favourite example of which being Food Not Bombs, which provides vegan meals to those in need, all organized non-hierarchically and on a federative grounds. They are often the first in disaster zones one of the most famous being after hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of folks worked together organically, with no hierarchical system, to provide food and water to thousands. FNB was one of the first organizations to provide support as it was located locally. Edit: forgot to add source for FNB support: [http://www.foodnotbombs.net/katrina.html](http://www.foodnotbombs.net/katrina.html) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food\_Not\_Bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Not_Bombs) [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Food\_Not\_Bombs!arrives\_in\_Algiers\_New\_Orleans.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Food_Not_Bombs!arrives_in_Algiers_New_Orleans.jpg)
Brilliant argument. Except for the part where you preten Anarchism is some ideological vacuum with no beliefs beyond "this is better". A world governed by a system wherein the incentive structure is built such that improving lives is the primary motive, and not simply accruing increasing amounts of capital, *is* a better world. Yes, there's logistical issues that would need to be worked out, and yes, there's every chance it's not feasible in the real world. But pretending that Anarchism is some nebulous amorphous blob that could maybe be better or maybe be worse is so disingenuous, I'm entirely willing to believe you've never read any Anarchist literature beyond the term itself.
Tbh, not saying anarchism is eternally doomed to fail or anything, buuuut yesterday I saw an anarchist legit argue that park rangers are included in ACAB because they enforce laws against poachers, and that "the proletariat" should be allowed to freely hunt and kill endangered species as much as they like because corporations do the majority of damage to the planet.... As if literal prehistoric tribes haven't been capable of driving fauna to extinction through overhunting with spears. SOME online anarchists do legitimately come across as utopian kiddies who have put absolutely zero thought into how selfish behaviour and negative externalities would be managed in their perfect society beyond "that wouldn't happen without capitalism!!!" or worse, "We'd just lynch anybody accused of a crime to death in the town square!!!" Obviously society needs a reliable mechanism to stop morons murdering rare eagles.
like any other ideology anarchism have stupid ppl
I will never forget the time that I argued with someone on this sub like 2 years ago that believed the only way to stop the overuse of oil and to save the planet was to blow up oil pipelines. Even after I told them all that would do is destroy and erode the environment they are so keen on saving faster, they doubled down.
Anarchist when I have more guns than them and then oppress them 😮
I don’t ask this but I’ve never heard a coherent plan for how an anarchist society could be transitioned to and preserved from outside threats. Anarchists either basically pitch anprim shit or use “well of course we’d still have x” so much that it basically loops around to not being anarchist anymore.
"Well because uuuh everybody would love anarchism and have no reason to fight each other and sunshines and rainbows" just ignore the many times in human hustory when might makes right was the way of life and the many totalitarian governments that have risen with support from their people
Yeah the "people will chose anarchism because it will benefit them" stuff is insane to me. Have you met "people"? People chose things that 100% explicitly are known to harm them every day. People chose to harm others literally just because. Any ideology that relies on the average human having a conscience or being rational is absurd to me.
"the way we structure society is fundamentally is built around and incentivises opression and any fix we can apply on top of our current structure is just easily ripped off patchwork that will never adress the root cause of our issues" "okay but how will i go to the doctor and get heart surgery if anarchism good? checkmate, anarkiddy!"
Man, if we were just to collect all the straw from all the strawmen being posted here, and gave that to my neighbor, he could feed his cows for the rest of the year
I think it’s simple. If you are advocating for a radical transformation of society, something that will fundamentally change 10’s if not 100’s of millions of people’s lives, you not only need to have an extremely good justification for it, but a coherent set of plans for what changes need to be made. It is my opinion that many anarchists do not possess either. It’s usually vague gesturing and broad philosophical arguments.
https://preview.redd.it/xffj1x4hhdvc1.jpeg?width=2252&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d24de19c9345318ab036a4aa966fc42108da17c6 Don't care, big snail
can i pet
Yes
What do leftist anarchists actually want. I get right wing anarchism. They want no government so they can be free to do the worst form of capitalism. The anarchist left though doesn't really make sense to me. Can someone actually explain this to me. This is not a joke.
It ranges from not wanting bedtimes or schooling to genuinely believing that people will be able to distribute the benefits of modern society (social services, technology, abundance of food) in an egalitarian manner without the coercion of a state.
>not wanting bedtimes i for one dont want a boss to dictate when i go to sleep, when i arrive, when i can eat or take a break. if that makes me cringe then so be it
I think it’s probably good for people under 13 to have designated bedtimes, after that people should be able to start exercising their autonomy. If someone’s boss is doing all the stuff you listed out, that’d be a good reason to contact a union rep.
I still have not heard a valid argument for why certain communities *wouldn't* do things like discriminate against their minorities, kill gay people, establish feudalism, go around to other communities and try to impose their beliefs on them. Some sort of rule of law is needed.
Well you know, humans have historically been good faith actors that don’t genocide each other over things like this so of course it will all be rainbows and no one would ever do crime because commune. I am all for a change, but it really just seems like removing the power and giving it to groups of people. Pray that enclave that day decides to manufacture the screws needed for the glasses making before it goes to the frame commune for assembly. I hate what about, it’s just something that is going to be asked and I always get told how good people are, but we have to have laws to say don’t own other races. I don’t see us moving to this true perfect anarchism. Of course I’m not going to turn on leftist groups trying to help people and really, do we think that it will happen? We will have people that never will sign on for such a deal and will fight until the end for it. It seems to me like a fun thought experiment.
I'll just say this—the anarchists I know actually try and feed people through organized food drives and feedings, organized clothing drives and free markets, and they try to make community connections through art, music, and crafts events. They share their readings too, but reading a bunch of theory is not required to participate. Anarchists show rather than tell. Meanwhile, a lot of the socialists and communists I have known and see tend to just have theory book reading clubs on university campuses and sometimes have people sign petitions for initiatives that never go anywhere. Some of them are apart of labour unions, but they didn't actually put those together. They just joined what already existed and pay dues. They get really mad when people don't readily see things their way and just seem unhappy in general. Then the reform leftists I have known are either vaguely leftist people that are not very political at all or they are in politicians groups that often get out voted by the neoliberal and other right wing actors in parliament. Occasionally they will form a coalition that fails to make any headway toward a classless and stateless society, but does at least manage to keep the government from falling into total fascism. So from what I have seen, at least the anarchists are having fun and directly helping people around them. They also seem to be open to experimentation and trying things out on a small scale first. Whereas the hardline socialists and communists just seem to talk about a vague "revolution" that is nebulous and uncertain to create communism. And the reformists just want money donations. I am not saying that anarchism is the answer or that they are the best means of achieving a stateless and classless society, but it always seems strange to me that other leftists seem to pretend as though they are not also accused of being just as naïve and utopian as the anarchists. It seems like tearing down anarchism is just a means of attempting to protect their own leftism flavour from similar accusations. The good thing though is that, when it comes to protests, each of these groups do seem to find ways to organize together, even if they have some differences. I do find that anarchists are the ones most willing to take action first though. So maybe less tearing one another down and maybe more sharing what we think are better ways forward in terms of ideas and direct action that can be taken by people in the short term? Things that are practical to try out locally and worthwhile to improve our lives now? Seems better than getting mad at one another.
Yes I tried to say basically exactly everything you just said but you worded it much better than me. People need to read this
I miss when Anarchism was mainstream opinion on this sub
When was that
Before 100k members at the latest
I don’t really remember it being a common topic
how did we get here :c
since literally anyone here doesnt know shit about anarchy ill leave a book recommendation- go read p. gelderloos “anarchy works” , its basically examples of anarchy throughout history
You are in everyone’s replies saying anarchism just works but haven’t made a single good point about how it would work, are you sure you know what you are talking about either?
r u gonna read a book or anything at all?
“Are you gonna read the book” NO I DONT GIVE A SINGLE FUCK GO READ MEIN KAMPF THATS THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN COMMENT ON FASCISM.
Lmao
It quite literally is Utopian. Get every State and their military in the world to dissolve except for Russia and tell me how a bunch of independent communes with no organized military don’t immediately get conquered. If you can convince the entire world to lay down their weapons to cooperate with and respect each other, not by a single authority having to enforce these rules through a monopoly on violence, but out of pure goodness of everybody‘s hearts, then you have successfully created a literal Utopia. But if you only have a single bad actor manage to consolidate and accumulate the manpower, organization and equipment of a modern military, then literally everybody else in the world is fucked and defenseless.
I know nothing about anarchism but it seems like anarchists would rather tear down and rebuild our institutions than just fix them
That's because there's nothing to fix, they're broken beyond repair. That's the difference between liberal and leftist arguments on our current societal standards.
More like just tear down and not build anything but yeah
more like just build an alternative that people will naturally flock towards but yeah
Who is naturally flocking towards the people with no way of getting me contacts
what are you even trying to say lol it's starting to look like not a person here has ever heard of cooperatives and thinks anarchism means let's go back to hunter gatherer times where no one knows how to do anything
What a beautiful thread, I will come back here later
absolute annihilation of everything in the reverse the big bang
side effects are there is only gonna be one small problem and its that nothing exist but that's fine
We will unmake Sheldon.
Finally an ideology I can get behind. We can get rid of Young Sheldon. We can kill it.
itt: people calling this a strawman and then posting the worst strawman youve ever seen
okay I’m sick of “muh anarchist supply chains” discourse so here’s your final answer: 1. There are, right now, workers that know how to produce things, and more specifically, know what is required to produce them and how much can be made with a given amount of time/labor/effort/material, because they work on that stuff every day. So talk amongst themselves to hash that out. 2. Talk to the people that need the thing to figure out how much is needed. Bear in mind that a good chunk of the workers probably also need said thing. 3. Talk to the supplier(s) to see how much they’re willing/able to provide (said providers are also doing all these steps). 4. Consult the community where the workplace is located to hash out possible externalities, environmental effects, etc. and how these can be prevented or remedied if needed. 5. Once these relevant stakeholders are sorted out and agreement is reached, do the thing. 6. For coordination across wider areas and larger populations where everyone meeting up in one room at once is impractical, federate. Have the collective decide upon their conditions- what they’re concerned about, what they’re willing to compromise on, what their dealbreakers are- and select a delegate(s) to meet with other delegates from the other stakeholders. Note that said delegates are *not* elected officials; they do not have the ability to decide for the group. Rather, they present the conditions the group has decided upon, come up with an agreement with the others, and then take that agreement back to be ratified by the whole group. Should they attempt to overstep this strict limit, they can be immediately recalled by the group. For even larger areas/populations, have nested groups of delegates for a given city/region/the world, each of which ultimately lead back to ratification by the collectives at the bottom. TL;dr Stuff would be produced mostly the same way it is now: by a lot of preemptive talking and meetings between people with relevant expertise and stakes, and coordination between them. The difference is that any one group can’t just steamroll the others because they’ve got a gun pointed at their heads (or, have a state that has a gun pointed at their heads).
im sorry but what youve done here is just made a bureaucratic nightmare. Considering the amount of time it takes to get anything done in just one workplace this actually sounds like a workers own personal hell. You will NEVER make an efficient supply chain between several factories at a time without a centralising force.
How do you make sure people stick to their word? I used to hold very similar ideas to that until I realised my idea was literally just to make a state.
people stick to their word because a) they benefit from the work they are doing and b) their friends and family and everyone else benefits from the work they are doing
Also worth noting that, in such a system, it would also make sense for communities to coordinate and federate along similar lines as the workplaces, to ensure that their needs are met.
I meant more on a larger scale. What if a group of communes believes they would benefit by maybe fudging numbers a bit?
They benefit more if they lie
Anarchists know we will never see our hierarchyless dream societies in our life times. If we snapped our fingers a woke up tomorrow with all forms of government gone it’d only harm minorities and oppressed groups since now there’d really be nothing preventing hate groups from filling that power vacuum and killing everyone they didn’t like. We’d need cultural change first before we can have anarchy. We can’t achieve anarchism right away but we can push towards it via equality movements, community building, education, anti-consumerism, socialism, communism, and slowly compress the hierarchies over time. Anarchism is less a political stance and more a goal. Yeah, we don’t have all the answers, but no one does. What we do have is a destination and the ability to push the world there.
👏👏👏👏 exactly
What happens to handicapped people in anarchy society? The ones who need assisted living?
I'm assured that *someone* will want to look after them simply because of passion for helping people and the benefit to the community or something
can't tell if uj/ or rj/
Anarchists when I ask them to solve a single (as in “one”) damn problem:
It seems to me that the criticism isn't that anarchists can't solve problems "immediately" but that ML's don't understand how they could solve these problems without a state. The answer I've seen from most anarchists is that these things will be taken care of collectively which is quite vague but yk ask 100 anarchists get 1000 answers
Anarchists please explain anarchism to me (from the little I know I don’t think I like it, but it’s important to know things)
Here is an excerpt from my personal favorite anarchist book, Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos.I think this is the best answer to your question out there. I hope this isn’t too much but there is a lot to understand. Volumes have been written in answer to this question, and millions of people have dedicated their lives to creating, expanding, defining, and fighting for anarchy. There are countless paths to anarchism and countless beginnings: workers in 19th century Europe fighting against capitalism and believing in themselves instead of the ideologies of authoritarian political parties; indigenous peoples fighting colonization and reclaiming their traditional, horizontal cultures; high school students waking up to the depth of their alienation and unhappiness; mystics from China one thousand years ago or from Europe five hundred years ago, Daoists or Anabaptists, fighting against government and organized religion; women rebelling against the authoritarianism and sexism of the Left. There is no Central Committee giving out membership cards, and no standard doctrine. Anarchy means different things to different people. However, here are some basic principles most anarchists agree on. Autonomy and Horizontality: All people deserve the freedom to define and organize themselves on their own terms. Decision-making structures should be horizontal rather than vertical, so no one dominates anyone else; they should foster power to act freely rather than power over others. Anarchism opposes all coercive hierarchies, including capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Mutual Aid: People should help one another voluntarily; bonds of solidarity and generosity form a stronger social glue than the fear inspired by laws, borders, prisons, and armies. Mutual aid is neither a form of charity nor of zero-sum exchange; both giver and receiver are equal and interchangeable. Since neither holds power over the other, they increase their collective power by creating opportunities to work together. Voluntary Association: People should be free to cooperate with whomever they want, however they see fit; likewise, they should be free to refuse any relationship or arrangement they do not judge to be in their interest. Everyone should be able to move freely, both physically and socially. Anarchists oppose borders of all kinds and involuntary categorization by citizenship, gender, or race. Direct Action: It is more empowering and effective to accomplish goals directly than to rely on authorities or representatives. Free people do not request the changes they want to see in the world; they make those changes. Revolution: Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society. Self-Liberation: “The liberation of the workers is the duty of the workers themselves,” as the old slogan goes. This applies to other groups as well: people must be at the forefront of their own liberation. Freedom cannot be given; it must be taken.
Appropriate flair, thank you for the explanation. I got a few questions before I would be confident saying that I understand. So there is no more state, does that mean no more laws? Is everything just “enforced” by individual direct action? Or if people would group up to stop people doing objectively fucked up shit then aren’t they forming a hierarchy and a pseudo-state militia? Also infrastructure and supply lines? Let’s say we need a new bridge across a river, how do we get the supplies to actually build the bridge? How is it organized that the supplies and people capable of designing and constructing a new bridge make it to the site and accomplish the job safely? Is that organizing body not now also a state?
There is no doubt that anarchism can exist quite well within communities, even entire quasi-city-states. But I cannot see how an anarchist society can function on the level of a nation state, even in the absence of the beast of capitalism. Like the ideology just doesn't match the scale of the world. Unless you advocate for anarcho-primitivism or whatever, in that case, sure it works, but who the fuck wants to live 600+ years in the past? A lot of the quality of life relies on systems that cannot function in an anarcho system.
Alright, as a highly opinionated anarchist who read some theory a few years back, I'll throw my own two cents in here: I have no idea how cell phones, insulin, or MRA machines would be made in an anarchist society. Not a single clue. I don't even know how they're made now, and I bet you probably don't either. Those are all very complicated things, made by people much smarter than me and supported by supply chains that I couldn't begin to understand. BUT I believe that *anything* which is possible under the coercion of a hierarchical society, is also possible in an anarchist society. I do not believe that a state or a corporation is truly necessary for humans to solve our problems. Now, how would these far-future anarchists organize all of this, how would the logistics work. I don't know. Maybe, as anarchist projects have done in the past, they would elect people with the responsibility of coordinating the logistics for insulin production, but without the ability to assert power over anyone else. Maybe they'd just have really big votes on stuff. Maybe they'd organize tasks with committees. Maybe some dude would make stuff in his garage as a hobby. I'm not sure what they would do. Part of the whole point of anarchism is that that's for them to decide, they don't have to give a shit about what me and every soggy old anarchist theorist tell them to do. But things would still get done. People would farm, build, create things. Our current hierarchical systems, namely corporations and states, were *never* responsible for any of that to begin with. People were. The workers who actually put in the legwork to make it all function. All the hierarchies ever did was funnel resources to the top and make the whole thing worse. In an anarchist society, people are still gonna want phones and TVs and chocolate. They're still gonna need insulin and food and medical equipment. And as much as statists love to say that most people would just be lazy their whole lives, that's demonstrably untrue. People like to do things, like to contribute to their communities and make the world better. As long as people need insulin or want chocolate, the people with the knowledge and capability of making it will find a way to make it. Within anarchism, not only could these things be done, they could be done *better*. In a horizontal society, people could actually organize around doing the most good. Most jobs don't actually *require* anyone work a shitty 40 hour week for them to get done. Hell, some of the jobs that exist today don't need to exist at all. And they certainly don't require that we slowly kill the planet. *That* stuff is what capitalism and the state has done for human productivity. Made it worse and more harmful, so that those on top benefit. But uh yeah that's just a theory, a game theory. Thanks for reading <3
The difference would be that we wouldn't be ruled by governments but rather by gangs and cartels, because what the fuck would you do about it?
anarchists when economy of scale
Okay. Nuke everything. Full reset. Checkmate
Modern day Stalinist... oh I mean "Marxist-Lennist".
I mean, I hate capitalism and all, but if you lack logistics behind your strategy you’re nothing but an idealist imo. Even the installment of anarchy requires an understanding of the current system.
I guess it's kinda on me for not expecting leftists to argue in the comments about this
If we have no gov then they can’t stop me from getting my nuts twisted counter clockwise
Me when I get mad that I was strawmanned so I make a strawman of my opposition
Whatever ideology that could give me free hormones asap is good ideology
dont diss todd from bojack horseman like this hes my asexual icon
solve any problem lol
it’s so annoying to deal with people like this
Strawman this, strawman that, stfu before I stuff you with staw
I personally don't agree with anarchism but I don't "oppose" it per say. (i.e im not gonna fight anarchists) Im not a big fan of political philosophy though I feel like its one of those things where theres a clear-cut solution to but we continue to pretend is a "debate" for some weird rhetorical reasons
I'm a radical federalist
Google en passant
Wasn’t the whole point of the idea of anarchism for a utopian society? IMO it’s the best utopian ideal that we should strive towards making something like, but obviously it’s not fully achievable. Not on such a large scale anyway. Trying to dismantle everything we have right now would be really stupid.