[yes, we got a new Andrewism video for Labour Day!]
“Anarchism - a political philosophy and practice that opposes ALL hierarchies along with their ‘justifying’ dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, where free association, self determination, and mutual aid form the basis of our society.”
This concept of free association is interesting to me as I’m not very familiar with it. How does it not devolve into warring gangs of people seeking to undo each other’s work?
For example, a group of builders perceives a need for more housing, so they want to build an apartment building at the edge of town. Another group who gardens there is opposed. Clearly there is a need for some process that mediates between these groups. But if not through consensus or democracy, how is this done? Free association seems great for things that are not controversial, but almost any large project is going to be controversial, and there will be a nearly constant need to resolve such disputes. How to do so efficiently and without hierarchical relations is one of the biggest challenges to anarchy, and I don’t see how free association solves this issue.
Anthropology has a lot to teach us on how people dealt with such large-scale endeavors without the state. If there’s conflict, they find a mediator or perhaps hold a meeting between the two groups to hash these things out. Sometimes, two groups would go to war. But anarchy is not merely statelessness, it means a society of consent and collaboration without hierarchy. Previous forms of statelessness may see peoples going to war or exert hierarchy with one another over any sort of disagreement or conflict, but anarchy means means a commitment to figuring out how to settle conflict and disagreements without hierarchy. So yes, anthropology has a lot to teach us on how people dealt with conflict in healthy ways. Sometimes they’d settle conflict in violent ways, but our purpose is to learn from these and do better.
tl;d: how is this done? talk to each other and learn from how people mediated conflict without states.
Would love to see resources on conflict resolution from anarchic societies if anyone has them.
My MIL is a community mediator using nonviolent communication which I highly recommend people read up on if they are interested. It’s interesting and useful stuff.
Well I think part of the answer comes from having a society that is more interconnected than we currently have.
If there were people that were both part of the gardening group and part of the builder’s group then those people would have the necessary common knowledge to be able to satisfy the needs of both groups.
That is part of why I think a society of anarchists necessarily needs people to be educated in ways that make them a lot more generalist than we are now (hence the emphasis most anarchists have with the idea of self-sufficiency).
Edit: Also in the cases where there isn’t significant overlap between the two groups having a third group that does have knowledge of both of them participate in the decision making would also serve the same function.
Yeah I mean there are lots of possible mediation strategies but my experience is that having a formal process of who should be consulted and how disputes get settled does avoid a lot of conflicts and bad feelings. Of course, this does add complexity, places where hierarchies can creep in, and inefficiencies in solving community problems. So there is probably no one perfect system but we may need to experiment with lots of structures to see which has the best balance of features for each specific circumstance.
Maybe I misunderstood but Andrew seems to be indicating that there isn’t a need for formal groups to manage shared resources, and that such groups will naturally arise and disappear based on common interests. But I think there will naturally be factions with different priorities in terms of how common resources should be utilized, just as there are today. Perhaps as you say with a more developed sense of solidarity these problems will lessen but I have a hard time thinking they will disappear.
I am not sure I can envision how this free association concept would work in practice for these controversial issues, but I certainly am interested to see this principle in action on a small scale to find out.
Now I’m not 100% sure of this because I’m working from memory, but I think Kropotkin gave examples for this in “Mutual aid”.
For Eskimos he mentions that anything an individual catches or gathers belongs to the clan as a whole, and then it is redistributed. People living in tribes (with no concept of a separate family) generally live ‘each for all’.
Village communities, on the other hand, recognized only movable property as privately owned, while land belonged to the community, and everything had to be done with the consent of the community.
When disputes did arise, they were treated as communal affairs and mediators were found to pass a resolution. If the resolution was not agreeable to one party, the case would go before the folkmoot and the decision reached was final. The party that had to provide some reparation could either accept, or leave the village and go somewhere else, but there were no law enforcers.
A little less rosy than Kropotkin, and not really anarchist, but Icelanders lived without a state until the late 13th century. They had a (bi)yearly gathering (the “Thing”) where all grievences could be brought forth before the judges and people. When a sentance was passed, it was up to the family of the ‘winner’ to see that the other side accepted it, there was no state figure to force them.
Hierarchies are opposed, not mediating third parties nor organization. Ask ten different anarchists and you’ll get twenty methods to approach your thought experiments.
Sure, I’m just wondering what people think about this. The video seems to imply that consensus and particularly majoritarian democracy won’t be necessary but I’m not sold on this.
Right? I mean, it all sounds great in theory except we know that people are opportunists and eventually will see a situation they can exploit that undermines the system.
It’s the basic problem that as soon as someone starts a gang that is willing to violate the social contracts that motivate good behavior in an anarchy system the anarchy system doesn’t have any mechanism ready to defend itself and has to rely on people being spontaneously able to band together and violate the tenants they are trying to uphold by organizing into a violent hierarchical organization capable of fighting back.
During the Ukrainian Revolution, there were all sorts of gangs that emerged that killed Jews and stuff. What did anarchists do? They killed those pogromists in turn. Under conditions of anarchy, there is no state that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to punish those who break the “social contract.” Rather, there is a plurality of violence that various groups can inflict on offenders. If you fuck around, you will find out.
Is this a violent sort of life? Not really. It’s not as if Indigenous or pre-state peoples live in violence all the time. Sure, violence did happen, so what?, violence happens all the time under state societies too. The difference is that without a state, people cannot call on a higher power to coerce so they have to rely on each other to keep each other safe. Besides, the people doing the raping, stealing, and killing in state societies are precisely the people protected by privilege and the state. Under conditions of anarchy, such privileges mean very little.
I’m very tired and should not be up right now, so sorry if this isn’t super coherent or very well explained, but bear with me.
the people doing the raping, stealing, and killing
I do lean very libertarian/anarchist, but possibly my biggest issue with the concept is that you are now assuming that the people who would be targets of the violence would be the ones doing all that.
Having a monopoly on violence is bad, but on the other hand, the alternative sounds like vigilantism, which often leads to witch hunts. I’ll bring up a practical example to explain myself better:
There’s a streamer on Kick, whose name I won’t mention, who streams himself going after (alleged) child abusers. Recently (yesterday I think) he and other people were confronting a supposed child abuser (they just called him a pedo, but I assume they meant child abuser; otherwise how would they know he’s a pedo?) but they never showed any evidence of it. He was an old man. At one point a random stranger approached them to figure out what was going on, and they told him the old man was a child abuser. As a response, the stranger punched the old man, who fell backwards and hit the back of his head on pavement. He ended up laying unconscious in a large pool of blood. Rumours say he’s probably dead, which doesn’t seem far-fetched given the details.
In a lot of ways, having a monopoly on violence that is subject to hierarchies is quite bad, but the upside is that there is generally a due process where evidence needs to be presented, which will lead someone to be put in prison and not murdered - in most societies I know of. This can also be adjusted through laws and regulations. If someone practices vigilantism and murders someone like that, they themselves are subject to that law and might be put in prison. The vast majority of situations don’t end up with police killing someone; but knocking someone out (or just down) can very easily end up with someone dying from hitting their head on a hard surface.
Basically, what I fear that a completely anarchical society would fall into a spiral of vigilantism, where people kill each other because someone somewhere said they are guilty of something and most people are incapable of evaluating the situation properly and conducting a proper investigation, and will immediately resort to violence. This becomes even more worrying when you consider that me saying that about the old man situation will make some feel justified in using violence against me, because in their head: “that guy was a pedo, and he’s defending him, so he must be a pedo, so he also deserves to die”.
Hope that made some sense, and sorry I’m replying to this 4 days later.
I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding that social relationships to harm are fundamentally changed under conditions of anarchy. I apologize for the misunderstanding as writing on obscure forums doesn’t exactly encourage me to write with vigor.
Of course there would be a plurality of violence under conditions of anarchy, but this does not fundamentally mean the rule of vigilantism. Right now, people have been dealing with harm without the state for generations. These are found in criminalized communities like Black and Indigenous people, people who use drugs, people who engage in sex work, etc. These people develop mechanisms by which to deal with harm without the state and oftentimes without engaging in vigilantism. For these people, vigilantism is not a court of first resort but a last resort. Vigilantism puts a target on their back from the state. Instead, they talk it out, develop safety plans, plan boycotts and bans, etc.
Rather than thinking of justice in anarchic terms as vigilantism, think of it in terms of people dealing with harm and conflict in healthy ways.
Read on black army.
I think you have a point and a decentralized system will only stay decentralized if it has practices and norms that actively combat the natural development of hierarchies. This is generally what we see in non-hierarchical forager societies which are generally the most successful examples we know of at putting these principles into practice. But at least historically, these societies have not been as successful at combatting hierarchical violence by outsiders. For this reason I think a larger real world anarchistic society cannot necessarily pursue maximum human freedom without considering economic efficiency, organized self-defense, etc. How to develop such institutions and practices without hierarchy is a largely unsolved question, and it may be necessary to learn by trial and error.
Challenge the assumption: By other means but to a great extent, violence IS being done by our current housing system. Unless you are born into wealth: We’re fucked 6 ways from sunday. There is no middle class, never was.
We have working class, and then we have elites. If you’re not a C-level executive, you are no more secure…in tech I see many of my peers learning this the hard way with wave after wave of layoffs.
So don’t ignore the deaths of, evictions of, destabilization of lives and mental well-being, for all of those working 2 jobs and still not able to make rent. Living in their cars, while exectutives call them lazy and entitled. Dehumanization: check.
In fact, We dont devolve into Anarchism – we advance towards it. It is checks and balances turned up to 11, gardening the weeds against any heirarchy of oppresion that might attempt to emerge.
If any devolving is happening: “Fasicism is capitalism in decay” about describes it.
May we yet preempt it’s barbarism.
