The Anarchy Thread

Yeah, but that specialization would need ironclad trade agreements and/or markets to make sure goods get where they need to be, which means they'll need effective dispute resolution procedures, as well as enforcement mechanisms. And at that point, you're looking at something rather like a state.

Well, as I said, this (and tendency for being insular) is the reason why I'm not an anarchist.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 21st 2023 at 10:33:49 AM

You can have an anarchist state, the problem is hierarchies, not the organisation into entities on the international stage.

Didn't say anything about international affairs, I said "dispute resolution and enforcement." And while purely informal means work well within a single commune, as you get to a federation of communities specializing in different things, you're a lot more likely to need specialists in managing disputes and enforcing rulings of the federation as a whole, and at that point I'd say you have a hierarchy.

Now, the tonic for that is to have all such authority clearly derived from consensus, and of course some means of making sure that military specialists aren't able to hijack control of the system (and while you can have a militia army, I don't think you can have a pure militia air force - just saying).

I would imagine specialization (or lack thereof) would tend to be a weakness of anarchic societies. Basic issue is that specialization can lead to hierarchies pretty easily, particularly for people whose specialization is either something seen as important or something that would tend to give them power over others.

Not necessarily an insurmountable problem, but it would be something that they'd have to consider.

A big issue with specialisation for anarchist societies is that specialisation takes a lot of time and effort. Except members of the society need to put time and effort into both their own well-being and being an active part of the community.

There are only so many hours in the day and being both a deep knowledge specialist and an active part of the community will put a lot of pressure on that time.

What exactly do you mean by "being active part of community" ? Maybe this is just my ignorance speaking, but non-anarchist specialist also spend time by doing administration, organization which is not directly related to their jobs, right ?

EDIT: By organization, I mean that a lot of things are team effort these days.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 9:12:11 PM

Have you ever seen a homeowner's association meeting? The only people who ever show up to it are the people who have too much time on their hands and want to use some of it on picking a fight with their neighbors.

That's "being an active part of the community;" going to the community meetings and making your voice heard, and keeping in touch with your neighbors in the meantime so you know what's going to be said at the meeting.

Well what I was speaking in my previous post was that in my (admittedly uninformed) opinion, non-anarchist specialist also need to interact with their community. As members of their team (if they work in a team that is), keeping in touch with the newest developments in their field, administration etc. That said, I guess what Silasw meant is that running a community may require even more engagement.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 9:23:43 PM

I’ll give my personal example. So during my anarchist schooling days (a community of around 100 including 20 staff) I did the normal school things of attending classes, eating meals with my peers, going into town, and hanging out with my friends.

I also generally spent 6-9 hours a week in community meetings where we discussed and made decisions on school rules and punishments for rules breaches or general bad behaviour. Alongside that I was (past a certain age) on the community wide rota to supervise any compulsory labour that was handed out as punishment, there was also a general expectation that as an established commune member you would be involved in some kind of community wide elected support activity.

You could be an ombudsman who mediated small disputes, you could be an investigator for where facts were uncertain, you could be an officer who did community wide wake-up and bedtime enforcement, you could be part of the committee responsible for organising social events like games of capture of flag, you could be a fines officer responsible for recording and administrating monetary fines (generally the maths teacher was the primary one of elected alongside a student), you could be part of our external affairs committee who did outreach to other places, you could be part of the visitor committee who supervised visitors and prospective parents, six times a year there would be committees established to decorate and organise a school wide party, three times a year they’d have a separate tuck shop committee who provided the funding for the party (the smaller half-term parties had the one committee that did both), you could take on a chairing or secretarial role for the community meetings, you could be responsible for the administration and supervision of a community space (I can think of 3 in my time). That’s just the ones I can remember 10+ years later.

Once you were an older community member (I’m talking 14-16 here) the social expectation would be that you’d hold at least 2-3 additional duties. I’d consider myself a middle of the road community activity person and I remember being on Investigations Committee, being an Ombudsmen, being a Beddies Officer, being on the Social Committee and being on the Bar (tuck shop) Committee all at the same time in my last couple years. Plus I ran my own very successful tuck shop when the party funding one wasn’t active, I was a buddie to new community members 2-3 times during my years there, I ran the Warhammer/D&D space and I acted as a mental health first aider so much that the paid school therapist apparently developed a very positive opinion of me despite us never meeting.

Their community enforced this by having rules about how long you spent away. Kids who didn’t live at the school were rare and kids only living there during the week was banned at several points in my time. Generally I believe you got 2-3 weekends away a term unless you had a special reason (plus 2 weekends a term where parents were able to visit and extended school holidays to compensate for not having half-term weeks). The logic behind that was simple, the community only functioned with active and involved members. You got a lot of freedom being part of such a community but it came with responsibilities.

Edited by Silasw on Jun 22nd 2023 at 8:49:46 PM

But wouldn't the second paragraph actually result in chaos?

And if an anarchist community only works within the Dunbar number, with no hierarchy, then how can humanity accomplish any grand or international project? 

Edited by jawal on Jun 22nd 2023 at 9:58:05 AM

We compromise and go semi-anarchical and/or we find a way to grow the Dunbar Number via either social change or neurological augmentation.

Just in case of confusion, Dunbar number is supposed limit of people we can have stable relationship with. Specifically, it is 150 people.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 22nd 2023 at 10:45:33 AM

...neurological augmentation? How do you expect to do that within the number? I would very much consider that kind of thing a 'grand' project by the original reply's metrics, what with research and manufacturing, as well as maintaining the facilities to safely perform it.

Yeah, this is why I'm skeptical of anarchism. The principles are good, but past a certain point, the amount of organisation leads to recapitulation of the state.

There's some other questions I have, but I don't think the Internet is the right place to discuss them.

There is definite value in questioning the utility of hierarchies and dismantling bluntly unjust ones, mind. Treating it as a hard rule for building a society can be... fraught, though, let's say. Not even saying it's impossible, but there are a lot of questions that need to be asked and adequately answered.

Edited by Chortleous on Jun 22nd 2023 at 7:37:30 AM

Eclipse Phase's answer is heavy use of AI-assisted cyberdemocracy and reputation economy, which is not a tech we have yet but might exist in the future (but then, so might fusion power). Of course, reputation economy creates a hierarchy, albeit a meritocratic one; people who contribute to the community and win the approval of their peers get priority over the ones who don't. (As the game's written by a pro-anarchist publisher, it mentions but kind of slides over the fact that this advantages the socially-adept and the ones who do "cool" stuff over the guy who stays in the background, isn't very social and keeps the hab's waste recyclers running.)

Edited by Ramidel on Jun 22nd 2023 at 4:45:57 AM

Popularity-based socioeconomic status?

No thank you, that sounds like high school - or the worst aspects of social media. Or something out of Black Mirror. For all its flaws, I’d take capitalism over that in a second. Being popular/personable and being useful/contributing are not remotely the same thing.

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 22nd 2023 at 5:56:21 AM

Yup. I feel that it's kind of inherent to anarchism in general, but especially relevant if you use social credit metrics to "encourage pro-social behavior." (Cory Doctorow wrote Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2003, before China got the idea - but it should be noted that he was writing a dystopian story and a lot of people didn't get the memo.)

Edited by Ramidel on Jun 22nd 2023 at 4:53:16 AM

I think the most mundane way to have an anarchic civilization on a larger scale is mostly to break the population up into communes then have those smaller-scale societies coordinate with one another. This would might be difficult to enforce, particularly without the person doing the enforcement becoming a ruler.

Also might result in hierarchies between communes, though I think that's especially inevitable.

In fact I'd say a way to reconstruct Anarchy Is Chaos would probably be to have the communities involved have a lot of difficulty working together, perhaps even with outright violence between them being common. It's less every man out for himself so much as every community out for itself.

Regarding popularity contests, I will play devil's advocate slightly:

• It's not a feature especially unique to anarchism (though it might be more pronounced).

• An anarchic society would tend to have mechanisms specifically to prevent people from gaining large egos and whatnot.

I feel that if a system can only exist in theory with the use of some comic book or science-fiction technology to change human nature, then it is not a serious proposal.

It is like if we talk about climate change and my proposed "solution" is: 

" No need to worry; we just invent Faster-Than-Light Travel, find a planet similar to Earth, and colonize it. How hard can that be?"

Edited by jawal on Jun 22nd 2023 at 4:08:53 PM

I would actually argue that Capitalism has an even bigger problem when it comes to large egos. It makes people (relatively) immune from suffering consequences for their actions by being rich.

Which is where we get to splits within anarchism. You get anarchists who are pushing for small scale anarchist instances that operate within the greater non-anarchist society (such as anarchist schools, communes, villages or workplaces), you get people who wish for the broad anarchist principles of limiting hierarchies and collective governance to be expanded (so more Swiss style democracies) and you get a handful of revolutionaries calling for a total overall without an actual plan.

The first two groups are making very serious proposals and can show serious results, they shouldn’t be ignored due to the non-serious nature of the third group’s proposals.

What would an anarchist workplace (on a middling scale, say 100 people) look like? If it’s an office, you’re generally going to want someone who plays a coordinating role (ensuring people aren’t duplicating each others’ work, keeping track of timelines so that different phases of a project have what they need when they need it). That’s basically what a manger is.

Offices, at least in the public sector in my experience, seem to have become less hierarchical in attitude over the past decades (anyone can offer ideas, you aren’t expected to defer to managers and they’re supportive and don’t power trip), but I can’t imagine a functioning office without any supervisory roles.

Likewise, what would an anarchist elementary or high school look like? You could integrate more peer-to-peer learning (though based on my high school experience that’s basically going to amount to the smart kids tutoring the less academically-inclined ones), but there’s still going to be teachers as distinct from students in anything I can enivision as a school.

I’m curious about what it would mean, so I’d like to understand more.

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 23rd 2023 at 10:03:24 AM

Simply, the collective would elect the manager (or an executive committee for that matter). If you look into Silasw's previous post, you can seed that anarchism is not opposed to electing an individual or committee to manager various matters.