The Anarchy Thread

Valve Corporation is pretty close to how I would imagine an Anarchist business functioning.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

A business would see decisions made collectively. The easiest example is the co-operative movement, where you have things like the John Lewis Partnership, where all employees (and only employees) are shareholder of the company. You also get the same with Building Societies.

For a workplace you’re looking at removing the hierarchy from coordinating roles. While person A might have a role in directing your work they are not in charge of you, supreme executive power would rest with the masses. An easy example would be output priorities over a quarter would be decided collectively by the team who’d do it and agreed by the total collective, not handed down by a manager. Valve would be a good example of a company embracing such principles.

Anarchist schooling is something I have personal experience with. From an actual education perspective it’s about student involvement and agreement in the learning process. Learning is something done collaboratively by the students with the teacher, not something done to the students. So lessons would be based on student chosen direction, class sizes would be tiny (7 was big at my school), non-classroom learning would be encouraged, and student involvement would be key, which generally requires lessons to be non-compulsory. I’ll note that this is such a radical break from traditional education methods that my school wouldn’t take students over 12 unless they already had some link to or history with alternative schooling.

That’s however just focusing on the output of such places. Any large gathering of people becomes more than just its output but also becomes a community. In a business it’s policy, in a school it’s rules, in a commune it’s laws. An anarchical version of anything will have such things decided and enforced collectively.

So at my school a teacher had no power to issue punishment to students. They were a member of the community like me and had the same power to call upon the community to issue a punishment. For a business this would mean a manager couldn’t write you up, they’d instead go to the collective and recommend that the collective disciplines you. The only things not dealt with at the community meetings were school finance (done centrally by the owner), the hiring and firing of staff (though we did have input), child protection issues (dealt with separately by the staff), and we couldn’t make any school rules that violated U.K. law (certain rules in the rulebook are written to highlight that they are U.K. law and thus not changeable by the community). We could permanently expel students if we wanted to (though the owner also held a reserved right to do so).

So for an office it would be stuff like deciding on dress codes, deciding if people would have individual desks or hot-desk, deciding the remote working policy, maybe deciding on organisational structure (how many output focused stuff versus support staff) and possibly all the way up to deciding pay and hiring policy.

I should note that around discipline and law enforcement you have to totally eradicate the idea of “ratting someone out” or “being a grass” for such a society to function. Every member of the community has to own the rules and generally enforce them. Reporting your friend for breaking a rule isn’t some act of malice against them, it’s part of your responsibility both to the community and to them. If a rule isn’t liked then you shouldn’t break it, you should make your case to the community to change it.

Exactly. Or it might be that an output director is hired by that the interview panel is the team they’d be supporting, or maybe it’d be done on a rota basis.

Edited by Silasw on Jun 23rd 2023 at 6:31:12 PM

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

Very interesting, thank you! I can definitely see the appeal of that in a workplace.

(What if the students, say, decide ‘today we want to play with lego’? The teacher rolls with it and improvs a lego-based lesson?)

The teacher might improvise, but they’d probably tell the students that they need more advance notice then that for a Lego based lesson and that there’s Lego in open learning space if they really want to do some Lego based learning today.

You’re actually more likely to get the reverse. At my school the science teacher once went on a tangent that they’d felt was true deep learning about the subject, only to have one of the kids go “that’s very nice [teacher first name], but how is it going to help us pass our GCSE?”

At the start of each school term each student would sit down with relevant teachers and go over what the student wanted to learn or what qualifications they were aiming for. The teacher would then draw up a lesson plan that fitted the student’s need. Teachers also had the authority to cancel classes if nobody turned up for an extended period. They’d put their time into something else.

You can quickly see why this requires a high ratio of teachers to students. As it’s rare indeed that a bunch of kids all want to learn the same thing, in the same way at the same time. Generally for us it happened once you were looking at qualifications for transition into the wider world.

Fun fact, there is actually a U.K. school inspector report which notes the viability of free-form creation of Warhammer army lists for learning basic numeracy skills. I know because I’m the little shit who spent ages telling the school inspector all about my army lists. And they’re required by court order to consider non-classroom learning when inspecting my old school.

X3 Rapid typing error, now fixed.

Edited by Silasw on Jun 23rd 2023 at 7:39:09 PM

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

First, the class was initially agreed on by the students, who are in it for the semester. So the teacher's coming to teach the original class. So...

• If the class decides that "today we want to play with Legos," that's probably a sign that their mind is collectively not on the class today for some reason and they should probably play with Legos. That's fine.
• If it happens regularly, the teacher should ask the class why they don't want to participate in the class they signed up for.
• If there's a bunch of students who aren't in school to learn and who just want to goof off every day, that's a matter for the community at large to deal with.
• If the students as a community think that school sucks and they're only there because it's there, or another school, then the teachers (in their professional capacity) and the owner have to bring up "okay, but UK law mandates that we meet minimum standards in A, B, and C, so you've all got to be able to pass your maths test," and then the community work together to ensure that everyone learns the minimum standards and are free to learn or not in anything else.

Ideally, though, the community will have started with and will only take in students who want to learn and are on board with the anarchist project (to the extent that seven-year-old recruits can be fully on board with anything long-term), which will reduce the likelihood of a majority revolt against the ostensible purpose of the community. Someone like me (I did not give one flying fuck about my grades or my education, and only graduated high school by a combination of parental force and raw talent, and that by the slimmest margin) would not be welcome in that school.

It sounds like (by the mention of a court order) the inspectors were quite hostile to the school.

Edited by Ramidel on Jun 23rd 2023 at 9:52:21 AM

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

I’ll note that you may not have started out that way. You’ll find that many kids have their love of learning ground out of them at a young age, thus why we didn’t generally take older kids.

I’ll note that as non-classroom learning was a major thing and a lot of what you learnt was how to be an involved, responsible and functional member of society you could go your whole time without attending classes. But generally kids would bunk for a couple years then decide that they liked learning and would need qualifications after school.

It helped that as personal gaming/entertainment devices became more of a thing we put limiters of their use. Edutainment games only during lesson time even if you weren’t in class.

Still, in the end you can get qualifications at any age, you only get one shot at a happy childhood.

Kinda. The inspector body had previously tried to shut the school down, it went to court, they had a bunch of stuff thrown out day one (like their objection to mixed gender single-use toilets), they we’re clearly loosing in court so offered a settlement (which was accepted by a community meeting held at the High Court) that became the court order.

The inspection I was there for was the first one under the rules agreed in the settlement.

Edited by Silasw on Jun 23rd 2023 at 7:23:35 PM

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

It does not stop me from understanding your post, but I do no get what this part of the text says.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 23rd 2023 at 8:30:56 PM

From my personal experience, I always hated school but liked learning quite a lot. I loved staring at illustrated science books, and also got a copy of A Brief History of Time in fourth grade I liked to read (though I'll admit I don't quite understand it).

Mostly it was the tedium of schoolwork and also remembering to actually turn things in on-schedule. It often felt like I was being judged more on my ability to efficiently do paperwork than anything.

There might be an issue with getting people to learn the things that they actually need to learn. For example, I'll listen to someone talk about World War II history or dinosaurs or space all day long, but trigonometry is a topic I can't make myself feel interested in.

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I'll say that one thing with communes is that there's selection bias in their population. Namely, they're all people who joined a commune.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

The teacher went off on a tangent during the lecture (as teachers are wont to do) and the students asked him to "hey, can we get back to the class we signed up for?"

Edited by Ramidel on Jun 23rd 2023 at 10:39:05 AM

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

From my personal experience I cannot say "hated" school. I would not say I particularly liked it unless it was a subject I enjoyed, but "hate" is hardly a word I would use to describe my relationship with school. Now, that was probably because I was a responsible enough person to realize that I have to pass the school.

EDIT: To be precise, I believed (and still do) that school is useful, even if it is not something I necessarily enjoyed.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 23rd 2023 at 8:50:51 PM

I despised school, attended solely by compulsion (until my senior year, by which point most of the hell was over and I was kind of coasting on inertia) and never learned (let's rephrase: never accepted) the unofficial lessons about being a contributing, productive member of society because nobody even considered that I might not actually want to do so.

Of course, to bring this back to the thread topic, a lot of that was because of the kind of bullying that this school had excellent measures for dealing with (or ensuring that it never became a thing in the first place).

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

Well, that brings up the question of how many people hate school because of the flaws in the system rather than its inherent nature. Perhaps a better (anarchical or otherwise) could help with that problem. At least to the point of accepting it (like I did). As noted by Silas many people have their love of learning rooted out of them rather than not having it in a first place. Sure we cannot make everybody into a hard-working student or whatever, that would be naive and unnecessary, but acceptance would be enougth.

I will suggest that one of the reasons a lot of kids grow to hate school is simply because they have bad experiences with teachers and other adult 'authority figures' who don't listen to them, treat them like idiots, and/or are on a constant power trip and force them to accept situations that they know are unfair (like, for example, punching a bully who constantly harasses you and getting the exact same punishment, if not worse, as the bully), if not outright dangerous (for another example based on something I actually witnessed, one teacher refused to let a student leave the room to get some air even though the student was quite obviously unwell and possibly on the verge of a panic attack, purely because 'no-one leaves the room during the lesson!'). So with that in mind it's easy to see the appeal of a 'flatter' power structure which incorporates the students more.

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Jun 23rd 2023 at 8:33:48 PM

"If you think like a child, you will do a child's work."

Well, that is exactly my point. People do not hate school because it is a school, but because of the flaws in the system.

EDIT: To elaborate on my personal experience. The one of the reason why I did not have school was because I had teacher who were decent. For the most part, at least.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 23rd 2023 at 9:39:58 PM

Considering all the security measures added over the years such as security cameras, will those still exist in an anarchist society? Or will they only be limited to places such as shops, banks, museums and other public spaces?

"Punishment is not the answer. Punishment is easy. It's lazy. Redemption is hard. Redemption makes you work."-Skulduggery Pleasant

They can, unless a particular community says no in their spaces. Anyway, most anarchists these days are big fans of sousveillance instead - that is, every citizen having their own phone camera.

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

So a lot of quality measures mandated by the state such as products being safe and properly tested, restaurants needing to fulfill a certain standard of cleanliness and hygiene, building inspections to check the safety of a public building or safety procedures at work are designed to keep civilization up and running and minimize deaths on a regular basis.

However since anarchic societies don't rely on the state, it's likely that it would be up to each anarchic society to maintain such measures for themselves, and it would be in their best interests to do so because their societies won't last very long if their people are dying off due to lack of safety procedures designed to reduce preventable deaths.

"Punishment is not the answer. Punishment is easy. It's lazy. Redemption is hard. Redemption makes you work."-Skulduggery Pleasant

I'd say a big question to consider is how large-scale supply chains work in a hypothetical anarchic "nation".

I'd imagine an Anarchic "Nation" would tend to be rather fractal, divided into a bunch of tightly-knit "subcommunities". Going off of this assumption:

Each community would likely care about the products that they're consuming, or producing to be used internally. You don't want shoddy products in your neighborhood. To use an example of something similar, drug dealers often don't want to flood the neighborhood they live in with drugs, they want to sell them somewhere else.

The real problem would be products that they're selling externally to other communities. Having said that, assuming that different communities can communicate with each other easily enough, word of mouth would be a factor here. Communities that sell shoddy products might get sanctioned, or worse.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Most real world anarchical societies do rely on the state for the very reason you’ve outlined, that or they operate similar to the Amish and don’t use much on the way of outside goods.

Because of the features of a modern society generally requiring more people to be involved then you can fit in a commune actual anarchical societies tend to balance themselves around what they can do themselves and what they have to (for practical or legal reasons) leave as the remit of whatever government they fall under.

From a purely anarchist theory perspective a mega anarchical community would delegate down enforcement of rules the same way small ones do. So the duties of carrying out safety inspections would fall to individuals selected (maybe by vote, maybe by rota) and audited by the community. I’ve actually been part of an anarchical safety inspection team, I was also forbidden from carrying out the inspection of the space I controlled. It’s entirely doable, it’s just that like everything else the time requirements for community oversight becomes unmanageable after a certain size.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran