Posed similar questions about communism in the past. I’m just trying to understand, I ask because I know there is a reasonable contingent of anarchists here. If you have any literature to recommend I’d love to hear about it. My current understanding is, destruction of current system of government (violently or otherwise) followed by abolition of all law. Following this, small communities of like minded individuals form and cooperate to solve food, safety, water and shelter concerns.
“Small communities of like minded individuals form and cooperate to solve food, safety, water and shelter concerns” - you literally described government. At its core, that is exactly what a government is.
Do “anarchists” hear themselves? I don’t know if OP is an anarchist, but this is why I don’t take them seriously. Their ‘ideal society’ always leads back to what is—in its most fundamental form—a government.
Anarchy, hierarchy and heterarchy are all different forms of social organization. You probably know what a hierarchy is. A heterarchy is a fanning out of organization and decision-making capabilities - think of how wikipedia editors work, or, I would argue, how the Senate and House of Representatives (are supposed to) work. Anarchy is just another organizational form, not a bunch of people throwing molotov cocktails or anything like that. At the core, anarchists seek to minimize the degree to which another group can oppress them by concentrating decision making among the small groups of people who will actually be effected by those decisions.
If you want to read a (fictional) example of how anarchy might work on a large scale, the scifi book The Disposessed by Ursula K Le Guin is superb (even if you are a strident anti-anarchist, it’s just such a good story).
Just finished reading The Dispossessed and was going to comment similarly. It was fantastic read and surprisingly modern considering it was written in the 60s. Some of her contemporaries don’t have the same sort of timeless readability as Le Guin.
The key anarchist takeaways from The Dispossessed are the use of syndicates in lieu of corporate or government structures, no private ownership or equity, and the absence of law, elections, and criminal punishment. Committees exist for public discussion, but the outcome of that discussion is non-binding (although one may find themselves an outcast). Le Guin presents anarchy like libertarianism mixed with socialism: you are free to do as you please, but you are obligated to recognize your role in the social organism.
Le Guin also recognizes that anarchist thought is in some ways extremely foreign to all of our modes of thought, philosophy, and language. So she devises a world where the anarchists invent a new language to correct and remove “egoist” ideas. The society she develops revolted against a hyper-consumerist society, referred to as “propertarians,” and this drives much of the plot and dialogue: what does it mean to not be an egoist while still being human?; what is the limit of personal possession before becoming a propertarian?; what happens when your personal freedom and needs are trampled on by the social organism?; and how long can a non-hierarchical society last when it inevitably creates systems that begin to self-organize into hierarchies and bureaucracies?
The protagonist realizes that any revolution must remain perpetually in a state of revolution lest the people settle into inviolable customs that then calcify into law.
And here’s the problem with anarchism: It requires fundamentally changing the human species.
No disagreement here. I wasn’t necessarily advocating the idea, but it was interesting to explore it and “try it on” for a while when reading the book. I think there is some value in attempting to steer society in better directions, but disagree with rewriting history or purging culture to do so.
Wikipedia is not an anarchy though. There is specifically a hierarchy in types of accounts.
Right, but small groups of people are severely limited in the level of civilization they can maintain. You can’t develop antibiotics without massively investing value into specific people and groups, who will then (shock) be more valuable. That will create a natural stratification unless those people are all saints.
Anarchism falls apart when faced with outside stressors like scarcity or competition. It only works if quite literally every single person buys into it fully.
Anarchy doesn’t mean no government. It means a non-hierarchical government. For example, parts of the US government are essentially anarchic already, like the various committees and subcommittees in the House/Senate that operate largely independent of each other, make their own decisions, and then present those decisions to other groups or implement them in other ways. The House/Senate in the US themselves are heterarchic, in that each senator/representative is (theoretically) on par with every other, they’re all peers, and decision-making is equally shared. The executive branch – or better yet, the military – is hierarchic in the most traditional sense. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing. You can arrange almost any other large organization this way if you want. Anarchists would argue that a big pharmaceutical company, university, etc. would benefit from less hierarchical structure to make them open to a greater range of ideas and operational strategies. Hierarchies are great for accumulating capital and resources to the top, though, which is why they’re so prominent in business.
The examples you’re naming are all carefully controlled, very narrow-aspect groups that are generally protected from their surroundings.
I can sketch you a big problem with turning, say, a university anarchist. Yes, in theory, you can get a greater range of ideas, but in practice the stressors will tear it apart due to human nature. There is always a limited amount of funding, so how do people work out who gets what? Unlike with food or shelter, it’s ALWAYS useful to have more funding. Why should I get more than you? Well, obviously because my history department is much more important to literally everything than your maths department.
So now what happens? Do we only cooperate with those who wish to cooperate? Sure, lets split up. Of course, from the remaining funding, my area of medieval history is much more relevant than that guys’ area of ancient history, and if we can’t cooperate we shouldn’t…
You can, of course, run a department, or a specific niche in an anarchist way. A specific research group, or a knowledge-sharing system would benefit, but that’s because those specific groups don’t really experience any pressures.
Noooo it’s easy to mistake but pretend everything is exactly as if there was a government but there actually is not a government 😉
Quite literally how everyone in the comments sounds.
Anarchy doesn’t mean no government. It means a non-hierarchical government. Parts of the US government are essentially anarchic already, like the various committees and subcommittees in the House/Senate that operate largely independent of each other, make their own decisions, and then present those decisions to other groups or implement them in other ways. The House/Senate in the US themselves are heterarchic, in that each senator/representative is (theoretically) on par with every other, they’re all peers, and decision-making is equally shared. The executive branch – or better yet, the military – is hierarchic in the most traditional sense. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing.
No, I’m not an anarchist or a communist. When I say small communities I mean less than 100 people with no clear hierarchical structure.
Not really (I’m not an anarchist, if that matters)
A government is an institution created to hold power between people and to act on their behalf (executive power) it is also a regulatory system (law, rules justice… the legislative and judiciary powers). That would be common with most ‘local’ entities. Albeit at a much smaller scale. More on that important nuance next.
A government is also an autonomous organism, a thing in itself, autonomous, with its own objectives. An administration or multiple ones, offices, bureaus, services, departments. It also a lot of people working for it. Things that are not found in local/smaller orgs. It’s so autonomous that it tends to grow beyond its original limits when left uncontrolled . It grows in order to sustain itself and in order to weakens/get rid of whatever it considers a threat to its own existence (any other form of power, say local vs national or federal). It will grow as much as it can even at the cost of the interest of the very people who devised it to begin with.
That’s why most democracies were supposed to have devised safe-guards against such excess. But the threat is always there. Suffice to watch the present US government to realize it doesn’t work as it should: the US executive is eating away the very fabric of country ‘democratic’ roots and values, and getting rid of all safe-guards by all means (corruption, threats,…). BTW, something remotely similar but less dramatic and much slower is happening in the EU: we’re witnessing a lot less democratic control happening, in exchange for a lot more bureaucratic control (even against ourselves and our own will, us the citizen).
Such a derive would hardly be possible with a local for of power (aka limited and surrounded by many other powers like it). A,d individuals in each one of those power would still weight enough to keep it under control (by sheer egoism) and even if, for some really odd reason, all individuals in one of such power would agree to abuse it at the exact same time and to go in the exact same direction (which would already be very impressive, in itself) all other powers existing around that one would suffice to put it (and its too confident members) back in its place, if not effortlessly at least it would be done.
As I understand it, the anarchist idea of small/local powers lies in the co-existence of many of them that would be as different and autonomous from one another as possible. Which is kinda neat but it’s also something that not many in the wide anarchist spectrum (from the far left to the most right extremists, so to speak) seem to be willing to accept. I mean, they’re all fine with the theoretical idea of having many independent smaller groups co-existing one next to the others but most of them only seem willing to tolerate the existence of like minded other groups… which, to me, is the main reason why I can’t imagine anarchism getting that far ever: they too want the world to be a perfect image of themselves. Which makes them behave very much like any of the more traditional/structured form of organizations.