What is Anarchism

And liberal capitalist 'democracy' works brilliantly: over 1 billion people living in poverty; 20% of people owning 80% of the wealth.

Also dangerous and unworkable.

No ones invented a system that works better with human subjects yet. Quite a few have been tried though. Facism, Communism, Nazism and so on. Didnt really work out despite the promises of utopia and talking about what a failure liberal capitalist democracy was.

Mind you, Ken Macleod does a decent series of books based on anarchist future societies - including anarcho-capitalism Akrasia, sadly - where everything works fantastically and everyones politically informed and no one takes advantage of human failings to sieze power. Mind you - it is fiction.

I've a few questions...

(1) How would one group of people be justified in saying "this particular area of land right here is ours held in common"...surely another commune could put in a claim for it? If it was rich productive land, it would get alot of interest? This does not only go for agriculture- it goes for mining rights, water supply, whatever.

(2) I'm guessing all such communities would have to be small for democracy and this whole system to function? Would there need to be a big drop in population levels for this anarchic system to be implemented? (Refering to Akrasia's original postings)

(3) Would there be any safeguards put in place so that 3 or 4 communal bands couldn't bunch together to attack another settlement for resourses?

For rather deftly executed examples of the lapsed hypothetical fallacy, read on...

Tristrame wrote:

Really akrasia,I'm for the most part enjoying reading this explanation of theory.
But it's about as connected with reality as Goofy from Disneyland.
The only place it *might* work is if you got together a collection of idealists and operated an isolated commune in the woods near a mountain somewhere and far away from the real world.
I'm not being harsh with you there ,I'm just being realistic.

Tristrame wrote:

*shudder*

In your opinion akrasia...I've no interest in discussing what you've been posting as it seems so anathema to reality in my opinion.
Carry on though.
I'll just pop in here for mod duties.

Meanwhile,I'm signing off now because theres thunder booming outside and lightning flashing - thats not fantasy and I'd rather not lose my modem

Wicknight wrote:

For anarchism to succeed the vast majority of people need to not be selfish beings. While you might argue that some of them aren't, or even that a lot of them aren't, it is ridiculous to argue that all of them aren't

The idea that the vast majority of people need not be selfish beings is not made ridiculous by the fact that, right now, they are. Again, it bears repeating, we are in the practice of theorizing here. We are discussing things which are not the case.

I shall offer again advice which, it seems, Dontico was not quite sufficiently equipped to assimilate, but with which we might hold out hope for our later hardline, steely-eyed "realists".

Me wrote:

Consider, however, Dontico, that in suggesting an alternative system to capitalism, Akrasia's point cannot, in fact, be assailed by simply restating what capitalism is.

Akrasia essentially is saying "imagine a world where people don't own property." And you're objecting by saying "but what about the people who own the property." They don't. There are none.

In a world where X is not the case, X is not the case. Saying, "but x is the case" isn't an argument. It's just being an idiot.

There is a difference between realism (in its many shades) and abject, utter, conservative dullardry. It is quite possible to live in the real world and to consider things which are not the case. This is of the nature of thinking.

Wicknight wrote:

Imagine, in your Utopian vision, that there are 3 children and 3 apples.

What you are basically saying that these children will be raised so that they will only ever take 1 apple. There needs to be no system put in place to ensure that they can only take one apple, because the desire to ensure fairness and equality etc etc will over ride the desire to have more than one apple.

So, what exactly do you do when a some point some child some where comes along and takes all 3 of the apples for himself. The 2 other children now have no apples. In this Utopian vision of yours do they accept the fact that they now have no apples, and just leave the first child alone. Or do they get pissed off that they have no apples?

Or is this just never ever going to happen?

I dont know all that much about Anarchism but wouldnt the question be why was the kid so hungry that he took 3 apples? Its never going to take more than he can carry and he cant sell them. If hes just greedy (which can happen but is far less likely in this system) and it becomes a problem then I'm guessing the locals would meet with him and try to sort it out, rather than getting the apple police to kick in his bedroom door and shoot him without asking questions. Somebody might take it upon themselves to guard the stock if this happens alot or a famine occurs, at least he/she could justify their authority. Anarchists feel free to correct me on this one.

Quite why you're here wasting your time arguing for the status quo is, I should suppose, really just an indication of how far out of your depth you've been arrogant enough to put yourself.

Wicknight wrote:

Well actually what I did say is that changing things just for the sake of changing things is ridiculous.

This sentences represents a fundamental misconception of what is going on here on this thread. It actually appears as if you're insecure about the existence of a discussion of the hypothetical benefits of an alternative system of social organization.

At no point has it been suggested that we should change things for the sake of changing things. That idea isn't contained in the most fundamental requirements of anarchism. Purportedly, change happens, if it does happen (or change should happen, if it is given the normative) for far more specific, and less flippant reasons, reasons that are only apparent after you understand what is being proposed.

Let's address this at an even more regressive level: We're not actually trying to change things. Think about that.

What we are doing... is theorizing about possible alternative forms of social organization. We're using the magic "what if?" So it is not a pertinent objection to clamour, "Change for the sake of change...." To do that is to refuse to enter into the actual discussion.

The idea that change will automatically bring improvement simply because it is change, and therefore we don't need to worry about what that change is, is beyond silly.

Again, we're not proposing change for the sake of change, assuming change will be good, and damn the consequences. We're saying, "what if it was like this instead", examining the permutations, determining exactly what kind of change would happen, and then deigning to assess the hypothetical social reorganization in question on the basis of what we have found to be its possible strengths and weaknesses.

It's a discussion that's happening here, not a revolution.

That's not fanatic. It's not "beyond silly", wherever that is. It's not ridiculous "bleeding heart idealists" shouting out in ignorance for change. It's a bunch of people thinking hard about the potential benefits of change in a critical light and without the impairment of lapsed hypothetical imagination, which demonstrates more forcibly than anything else you could utter just how right is the lesson that comes to us from Marx via Gramsci about how hegemony occupies the mind most insidiously.

All you are doing Fionn is demonstrating that you know little about the history of Russia or Iran.

I suppose the deeper point was beyond your apprehension?

The fact that I knew what I was saying about Iran wasn't strictly correct. In fact, I didn't actually say anything about Iran, the same way you didn't say anything about Russian history. You just quoted a bunch of "well-known", second-order, interpretative "facts" about Russian history, the conclusion of which is already telescoped in their utterance, and then, joy of joys, actually felt it necessary to finish the sentence.

That interpretation of Russian history only exists to act as a prop for the ideology in which it springs up. It remains subject to argument just how to interpret the history of the Russian situation. There is no fact of the matter in the interpretation of history.

Your disdain for history and the lessons that can be learned from it is quite depressing. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

My only disdain is for the way you purport to be performing "history". There is a certain point in studying history, which I don't know if you'll ever reach, where you realize just how limited are the lessons which you can learn from it. To draw anything stronger from history is simply to equivocate. As eventually becomes evident with long years of reading, history doesn't actually repeat itself. What occurs is that events happen which bear a certain similarity. It is indicative of the weakest type of historical ability to imagine here that this similarity is a repetition, that the events are identical (for which, incidentally, see Leibniz) and that infinitesimally diverse causal chains and unwritten subtext are immediately transparent to us and complete, and correct, and identical across time. To forecast the downfall of a potential form of social organization on the basis of (really) superficial similarity isn't to be an advocate of the lessons of history. It's to abuse the lessons of history.

That isn't how humans work Fionn.

This sentence, right here, is a huge, ridiculous advertisement for how stupid you're being about this.

I mean, what kind of point are you making here? Is is a medical point? "The duodenum's connected to the lower left dorsal fibula, and hence humans will be forever egoistic..."

Later on, you make a point about "you might as well be talking about robots". Well, are you talking about robots? Is that what you're doing? Because last time I checked, human beings have a choice about the way they act, have a malleable nature, and environmental and volitional factors can change how humans work. The last time I checked, I don't go about my life like a machine, with indelible, incontrovertible programming determining my every step.

That is, I should note, how Stalinists liked to regard human nature - as inert and vulnerable to reprogramming, completely ignoring the volitional aspect of human life. I think it's far less sinister to refrain from second guessing our selfhood, which is what you've been doing, imagining that humans function in this or that particular way.

But even if you want to ignore the volitional aspect of human life, which I imagined already that you did in my last post, you are completely ignoring the behavioristic proposition, that by completely altering the inputs (ideology, upbringing, socio-economic context, social organization, etc.) you will completely alter the outputs too, (behavioral dispositions). And that idea, distasteful as it is to me, still presents a problem to statements like "This is how humans work" or "that isn't how humans work", because there isn't any particular way in which humans work, given radical enough alterations to their environment and to their history.

The shift has nothing to do with it. Communism didn't fail because the citizens just weren't ready to be altruistic enough.

Communism failed because the system of governance was such that too much faith was put in the State to act only in the best interests of the citizens. The safe guards to protect the citizens against the government itself were removed, because of this idealistic idea that no one would want to harm the citizens...

...The system of government wasn't able to protect the citizens against abuse of power from the government itself, because of the ideals which the system were founded had too much faith that the government would act only for the benefit of the citizens without the need for democratic over sight. When the government stopped acting for the benefit of the citizens there was no recourse for the citizens to take to change that.

Curiously enough, and simplistic though this point might actually be, many anarchists would probably agree with it. They might argue that anarchism represents a massive, deliriously happy solution to the problem you've just identified there.

Do you know why? Because anarchism doesn't put faith in "the State". The citizens don't need to be protected against "the government" in an anarchistic society. Because there isn't any government.

Now precisely what lesson, applicable to anarchistic political theory, do you propose to draw from the failure of the USSR?

Time has got very little to do with it.

Let me elaborate what I meant by that. I meant by that that perhaps radical social change shouldn't happen by revolution. I meant that perhaps the time for communism might have come not when the workers decided that enough was enough, but when a situation arises, similar (let us say "similar") to the paradigm shifts of social change in history. By this I mean the what-we-would-now-consider almost natural change from dominion to feudal society, or the gradual segue of late feudalism into early capitalism.

That seems to be how stable (enough) social orders are made. Let's pretend anarchism would come about that way. Let's pretend that the people's safeguards are not suddenly removed. Let's pretend they become obsolete in a period of gradual change over the course of 200 years, because government slowly began no longer to exist in anything like a substantial form.

That may go some way towards clarifying for our slower readers exactly what was meant by the proposition "Perhaps it wasn't the right time for such a social order to come into existence."

It is ridiculously idiotic.

Indeed? Ridiculously so? My goodness!

In fact it white washes over the very reason mentioned above that caused such abuses in Russia.

Seeing as the example I gave was of a situation antithetical to the Russian situation, (ie. a naturally evolved social order, where the behavioral dispositions of its people are naturally attuned by nominal social conditioning, as opposed to a social order that came about on the back of a revolution, with very little actual gestatory development) I don't expect that you're correct there. Unless the sentence you're responding to is one you made up, because you didn't understand my one, in which case you may well be correct, but could you do this somewhere else?

In a world wide anarchistic system how do you stop a group ceasing or abusing power?

What power? There is no centralized power structure. There are no positions of power. How do you seize power in a social order that doesn't centralize it? You can't. There isn't a government, remember? There's no parliament house. There's no civil service. Local communities are municipally autonomous. You've made loud noises and threatening gestures, you've stuck a flag in your castle... and nobody cares. The world carries on.

Nobody would take you seriously anyway. I'd imagine an anarchistic society would deal with megalomaniacs in the same way as today's society deals with anarchists. Everyone would call them "hopeless idealists", saying, "nobody could possible wield power in a centralized way; it'd never work. Think of all the horrible administrative bureaucracy, and all the relentless consolidation you'd have to do, just to stay in power! Think of all of the examples from history that show that centralized power is a terrible idea! It isn't worth it. It's 'beyond ridiculous'."

In just the same way that most people, these days, I imagine, would not like all of their possessions to suddenly become public property, power hungry groups just wouldn't catch on in an anarchistic society. Nobody would see the point, and even if they could, they'd claim it wasn't realistic, and that'd it'd ruin things on everyone else. It just wouldn't be taken seriously. Wouldn't be tolerated. And the megalomaniacs would end up in a sorry little band, setting up hegemony over an uninhabited tract of untenable farmland, and play out their infinitesimal existence dominating each other with a tidy little pecking order, and refusing to cooperate with each other, because "that just isn't how humans work."

Or do you just hope no one will ever want to? Isn't that what the Communists did?

Once again, I should like to stress that the Communist analogy simply does not work because the hypothetical situation we have tabled for discussion is explicitly disanalogous to the Communist situation, in a diverse range of ways.

Imagine, in your Utopian vision, that there are 3 children and 3 apples.

What you are basically saying that these children will be raised so that they will only ever take 1 apple. There needs to be no system put in place to ensure that they can only take one apple, because the desire to ensure fairness and equality etc etc will over ride the desire to have more than one apple.

So, what exactly do you do when a some point some child some where comes along and takes all 3 of the apples for himself. The 2 other children now have no apples. In this Utopian vision of yours do they accept the fact that they now have no apples, and just leave the first child alone. Or do they get pissed off that they have no apples?

Or is this just never ever going to happen?

To begin with, you've loaded the decks, because you've capped the resources at 3 apples. With lower population and proper, elective management of resources, a proper utopia will be a post-scarcity society. So there'd be plenty more apples. For a good example of how all this might work, read Iain M. Banks Culture novels.

However, let's consider that this is an anomalous situation within our anarchistic society.

Knowing themselves more consciously familiar with basic theories of liberty than most people of their age are in today's society, the two children will find the greedy child's actions wanting in terms of compatibility. His greed isn't, simply, logical in terms of a distributive system. They won't get angry. They'll find it completely alien that he'd want to do it in the first place. They'll ask him why he did it, imagining that he'll have a good justification for having done it, and humoring the idea that such a cause might be worth the hunger.

When he just shrugs inarticulately, and tells them to screw off, they'll consider him psychologically unstable, and deem him anti-social. They'll be worried about him, because you'd have to be utterly crazy to behave like this in an anarchistic society. He doesn't need the apples, for Christ's sake. They'll wonder whether he's rationally able to look after himself effectively, given the environment and conditions in which he's expected to. They'll make a rational decision, with his own best interest only coming a close second to the need of the community, in abstraction. They'll use their superior number to divest him of his apples, and redistribute the apples properly, giving him as large a share as they each have. They'll then attempt to rehabilitate him in discussion, with proper regard for his person, to a more societally compatible manner of behavior.

Nobody said that an anarchistic society won't consolidate it's own ideology. Why shouldn't it? The redistributive rubric makes an awful lot more sense than the egoistic one. Perhaps we need to revise your (loaded) question once again. It's not a utopia. Everything isn't rosy. Some (greedy) people don't always get their way.

Why would the sociopathic kid do that anyway? Because in an anarchistic society, he's going to need the help and support of his peers. It'd be functional suicide to absent himself from the community of sharing by refusing to share. He simply won't have unadulterated access to any apple supply in future.

No, what is being done here is the creation of a political system that has absolutely no bearing on how humanity.

On how humanity? Really? Does humanity? Sure there isn't a verb missing there?

You might as well be arguing over how robots should govern themselves.

I consider this sentence ironic, since I'm the one who doesn't think humans have any basically incontrovertible programming.

History is the enemy of the idealist.

Really. The enemy of the idealist. The idealists of history have actually been quite fond of history. That is, I suppose, however, a usage of the word "idealist" altogether more exact and erudite than we might expect of you.

You might as well continue imagining that the word "idealist" is nothing but a derogatory word for delusional optimists, the antithesis of "realist", which is a happy, proper word, for world-wise, brave people, who are able to look the world in the eye, and not flinch! How neat and thoroughly comfortable! It's brilliant. It certainly saves us having to do any actual (heaven forfend!) thinking.

The idealists always look back in puzzlement at the ashes of their proposed Utopian societies and wonder what when wrong.

Do they? Well, that's them told, then, isn't it? May I just say, though, brilliant line of argument there! Absolutely eviscerating!

I can nearly see all those silly idealists, with all their silly books and lessons, tears streaming down their faces, standing on the edge of a gigantic, country-sized crater. Serves them right! Shouldn't have been playing with fire! Silly billies!

Unfortunately they never spend very long asking these questions. Perhaps if they did there would be less ashes to ponder over.

Never spend, perhaps, 9 pages on a political theory discussion forum, asking the very same questions, and not attempting to effect political change?

Never spend countless lines of rudimentary backtracking just to allow the catching up of people who can't seem to get past even hypothetical premise: the first hurdle in the process of thinking?

Never spend anytime involved in an activity dedicated precisely to the practice of asking "these questions", called political theory?

Those "idealists"? Bastards!