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Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 25th 2025 at 9:51:19 AM
I can attest to that, the anarchist boarding school I grew up in often had a very difficult relationship with outsiders, be that people who lived in the local town or even parents of students.
On top of that anarchism can have problems with scaling, there are only 24 hours in a day and the level of civil engagement needed by society’s members is high in an anarchical society, and it grows the larger the society is and the more complicated its issues. The internet and a lot of modern technology can help with that, but it can also hurt, as members of the community more easily disconnect themselves from the commune via cyberspace, thus reducing civic engagement.
Oh and the big issue, Bolsheviks
The establishment of an anarchical society will require working out how to address the attempt by authoritarians to crunch such a society by force.
If you don't trust politicians to run a state, why would you trust individual communities? What makes you think people won't simply give themselves more power than others? Also, it's not like those politicians just stop existing in an anarchist society. They're just out of a job. What do you think they're gonna do, just get a job at Subway?
Do not spare the feelings of those who would not spare yours.To be fair, I’d argue that humans are bastards also works against authoritarianism. Nobody is fit to be tyrant.
Having said that, I agree that humans are kind of douchie, but I think people tend to misunderstand how. It’s not that we’re selfish, but extremely ruthlessly tribalistic.
So, an actual anarchist society wouldn’t be “chaos” in the traditional sense. It’d be more like a bunch of cults, with little crime but also little potential for upward social mobility, and possibly quite a bit of xenophobia and/or militarism.
Leviticus 19:34That’s why you don’t do a full switch to totally anarchism overnight, for an anarchical society of any scale to work the people in it need to understand the principles of running a society, the ideas of negative freedom and positive freedom, the principle of the tragedy of the commons, the need for constant civic engagement for society’s wellbeing.
You can teach people these principles, I was taught them and helped teach others them, but you need to both start young (you’re in a race against society induced apathy/othering of government) and do it in a safe environment.
Also you can on some level just use familiarity bias in your favour, people are more cautious about the impact of their actions when they see the consequences up close.
People are a lot more willing to vote for a political party that promises to cut welfare, than they are to publicly argue that their neighbour who they’ve known for years deserves less support than they already get.
Edited by Silasw on Oct 1st 2020 at 11:41:34 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranA lot of the problems with judging how well or poorly an anarchist society would function and at what scale has to do with the fact that we are all very much shaped by the society we grow up in and the people here discussing this almost all grew up in a heavily capitalist, strictly (if not always explicitly) hierarchical society.
We think 'tribalism' is part of how humans naturally are... But is that true, or is that just because we grew up in a system and culture that, even if unintentionally, promotes tribal thinking? We think that greed for money or power is natural to humans... But is that true, or is that just because we grew up in a system and culture that uses a capitalist system where always wanting more is the very core of how the systems stays alive?
Are anarchist groups truly naturally distrustful of outsiders? We don't know, because the only anarchist groups we've got for samples are or were anarchist groups surrounded by non-anarchist groups who were ideologically opposed (and often, though not always, actively hostile) to them.
Would anarchism only work on a small scale? We don't know because the only large-scale attempts at anarchist societies happened before we had telecommunications and the internet.
And the notion that some social change has never successfully been attempted on a larger scale, therefore it must be impossible on a larger scale has been repeated for pretty every social change of significance to date.
A country the size of the Netherlands being able to build a successful democracy was once thought of as insane (this is how the Netherlands ended up getting into wars with monarchies almost constantly for the entire time it was a democracy).
Because, after all, the Roman Republic and Athens had been democratic, but the Roman Republic couldn't hold on to democracy once it got too big and needed an emperor to step in and organize things... While Athens only stayed a democracy until it got incorporated into the empire by the Romans because it got invaded and liberated consecutively by a series of different monarchies.
Except then came the invention of the printing press, the rise of literacy among people not part of the nobility and the clergy, which allowed people of 'lower stations' to share ideas and discussions en-masse. And the invention of weapons that did not require one to spend years upon years of constant training to be effective in combat, allowing those who had to work for a living to fight those whose previous dominance of society and the battlefield was contingent on a lifestyle that required peasants to feed them and provide money for their equipment while they they trained non-stop and then employed that training to beat any peasants who refused to do so back into submission.
And a couple centuries later, we had a democratic nation the size of Western Europe, which eventually grew to be roughly three times the size of Europe as a whole.
Before democracy took root on a large scale, people would have told you that human nature simply doesn't support common folk choosing their own leaders. The need someone to take charge of them without their consent or else they'll descend into moral decay and ineffectiveness and just get gobbled up by monarchists again. (We know, because we have the writings of people who very explicitly did claim exactly that in opposition to democracy as a concept).
Hell. Two hundred years ago people explicitly cited 'human nature' as the reason why enslavement and colonial depredation of non-whites by whites was just and right.
Angry gets shit done.I’d dispute this one. We have many many examples of small-scale anarchist groups, not all of their neighbours have coherent ideology and not all of the ones who do have clear ideologies are hostile.
I can only give examples from anarchical schooling, but I’ve got a handful in multiple directions alone from my personal life.
We had a very suspicious relationship with the press, in large part because of an ideologically driven attack upon the community by a ‘documentary’ crew that involved deliberately misrepresented footage being used to attack the family of our founder. This coloured our opinion of all news organisations for a long time.
Likewise our relationship with the local town, we saw them as a single unit (same as we saw ourselves), which meant we would hold them collectively responsible for actions of disconnected individuals. Thee was at one point a physical attack upon us by what’s believed to have been someone from the town, due to the tendency to group them all together the suspicion coming from that attack got placed on all the inhabitants of the town, ignoring the fact that logically it couldn’t have been any kind of collective action.
We were better with outsiders who had relationships to us, in our case that meant parents of students, but the difference in rights and consideration is rather stark looking back. Accidentally scheduling end of term on Easter Sunday, changing the weekends that partners could visit with minimal notice, the time my mother received an official warning from the community for a stunt she pulled... There was still a bias there.
We also actually maintained and I believe continue to maintain good relations with a number of other groups with a similar ideological mindset. The European Democratic Schools Movement is a real thing and at least in my time our relationship with other members was good enough to do visits to each other. Thee was certainly no perception of them in a negative manner, but that will have been in part due to us being allies in the fight for democratic schooling, even if we operated in different ways. We also always had a positive opinion of the UK’s other democratic school.
All of this is a sample size of 1 six year experience within a single sub-group of anarchical communities (anarchical schooling), so it’s far from any kind of gospel. But, I’m not the only person out there with experience with anarchism in practise, so the samples do exist, though I’ve no idea if the data has been gathered anywhere.
Edited by Silasw on Oct 1st 2020 at 3:23:19 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI'd argue we actually do have samples and experiments of anarchism in practice. Namely, in the form of communes (like you see), currently-existing forager tribes, and archeology. And well, Tribalism literally gets its name from a type of stateless society.
Regarding what people thought of Democracy before, it's worth considering a few things:
- People back then had, at best, a very poor understanding of anthropology and sociology.
- And people probably said the same thing when people began transitioning out of anarchy back when agriculture was invented.
As for our society encouraging tribalism, there's a few rebuttals I could make. The big one is simply that you have cause-and-effect reversed. We don't have a tribal impulse because we have a tribalistic society. We have a tribalistic society because we have a tribalistic nature. It's an incredibly easy tool to manipulate people with.
Leviticus 19:34
Having worked with both toddlers and teens, I can categorically state that children aren't generally inclined towards tribalism unless they're taught to be. And that teaching doesn't have to be explicit or intentional.
Puberty brings with it a search for belonging, which heightens tribalism and hierarchical thinking... But, in my experience, only (or at least much more strongly so) if the kid has already been taught to think in terms of tribalism and hierarchical thinking beforehand.
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Yeah, I should have been more clear on what I meant with 'ideologically opposed'. I meant it more in the sense that anyone who supports, or even has a general passive acceptance, of the notion that involuntary hierarchies are the norm has an opposite view of the role of society from anarchists.
Like... From what you said I surmise the whole reason why the people at your school developed the notion that the local 'outsiders' were hostile is a conflict between your anarchist view of a community versus their hierarchist view of a community. In that to those non-hostile 'outsiders', the hostile ones weren't their responsibility, because being hostile to you put them in a different sub-group of the community from them.
Angry gets shit done.This is a hard "citation needed" from me, chief.
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."![]()
So I can attest to the impact that puberty has on a child’s view of hierarchies if they aren’t used to them. The impact is very little, you’d see a stronger gender-division within the community when people hit that age, but the 15 year olds weren’t more hierarchical than the 6 year olds, if anything they were less, as they’d developed a feeling of responsibility to the community.
Yeah I’d say you’re spot on about our relationship with the town, in our minds the town and the school represent two very distinct communities, I’d be very surprised if the town’s population saw things as a simple divide like that.
You’re right that most anarchical communes are surrounded by non-anarchical societies, but as I said they do interact with each other. The European Democratic Schools Movement is one IRL example, but online you get more, many different sites that run semi-anarchically have relationships and interactions with each other. We can study such interactions.
Edited by Silasw on Oct 2nd 2020 at 6:14:15 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Seem we're of one mind then, barring some miscommunication. We're now starting to get samples of anarchist communities not isolated from other anarchist communities by a lot of intervening space occupied by non-anarchists, because we have better transportation, telecommunications and the internet and while there's differences of opinion and praxis, there's very little tribalism or xenophobia in those interactions.
Which means that past anarchist communities that were isolated by being surrounded by non-anarchists aren't a good sample group for determining how a large scale anarchist nation non-state would operate.
Angry gets shit done.Some level of communication has always been there, look at the British anarchists who traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight alongside Spanish anarchists, hell we’ve seen the same with the Syrian civil war.
Hell my old school alone is almost 100 years old, communication has changed a lot simply in its lifetime, but I’m pretty sure there’s been an External Affairs Committee the entire time, hell that’d probably be an interesting study, find people who served on the committee over the last 100 years and look at how the school’s communication with the outside world has changed.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranNVM, realized this might be more relevant for the Economics thread.
That said the removed topic does still have me wondering, Isis hypocritical for left-leaning governments to help overthrow or enact regime chance on other left leaning governments when in theory, both share the same goals regarding human rights?
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Oct 3rd 2020 at 7:39:37 AM
Came back from US politics and I apologize if this is off-topic or a derail, but everytime I read about Stalin and the Ukraine or the Holodomor I get so fucking pissed since there are people on the far left who stan that shit or say they may as well own it like it's a mark of pride, wasn't that big of a deal, or was a necessity since the Red Army needed to be fed as well thus justifying their actions. Just needed to vent that one out.
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Anarchist might still defend the Soviet Union in terms of defending the idea of socialism more broadly.
Not to mention some criticism of the Soviet Union none socialist might engage may betray a great deal of ignorance about what actually went on in the Soviet Union.
Mind you, that breaks down when “anti-revisionist” show up and start talking about dumb “left-coms” who never built any “actually existing socialism“ and how Stalin didn’t go far enough.
Edited by Mio on Oct 3rd 2020 at 12:11:30 PM
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Anarchists might defend aspects of the Soviet Union, like some of the worker co-op mechanisms the Soviets tried, the Soviet Union in general? Fuck no.
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You were talking to a Tankie then, by definition. I don't know by what metric they called themselves an anarchist.

Extreme tribalism, mostly. Take this as someone who was also a former libertarian/minarchist when I was an edgy teenager, before I grew up and did the research: humans are neither inherently good nor bad, and anyone who believes either is a fool. The best counter for humanity's worst impulses is other humans' best impulses, and humans need to come together for this to happen.
People who live in an anarchic society (anarchist in the classic cooperative sense as opposed to anarcho-capitalism which is just neo-feudalism in a nutshell) tend to be extremely good to their neighbors, but paranoid and jealous of outsiders at worst, and often disorganized enough to be unable to defend against bad faith actors such as brigands and wannabe warlords.
Edited by AlleyOop on Oct 1st 2020 at 7:35:59 AM