[danharaj]

> Anarchists believe in unmediated relations between free individuals, the absence of any coercive or alienating forces in societies, and an unquestionable, universal right to self-determination.

If that sounds difficult to implement, I agree! I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life. At the scale of society I see Marxism as just as important. How to square the two? I don't know

How to make a political program out of anarchism? I don't know, but I think it'll be possible with the right philosophical and scientific mindset. I think it would be a mindset quite radically different from how we currently approach the world.

There are some immediate problems to ponder. For example, my fist is an unmediated relation between individuals. Does the idea of free individual preclude it? You can't base your politics only on what you think ought to be, but also how it ought to change when there is a violation of that preferred condition. Clearly there are times when a good anarchist (whatever that is) will throw a punch, and how ought an anarchist society deal with that?

I like The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin as a thoughtful examination of society that tries to grapple with such small and dirty questions. As well as bigger questions of course.

In that quote, I don't see a solution, or a goal, but an orientation. It frames the world in a way that asks you to focus on certain possibilities that might seem remote, but have existed and will exist so long as humanity exists. That's why I'm an anarchist and why I like and agree with this piece.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Anarchists believe in unmediated relations between free individuals, the absence of any coercive or alienating forces in societies, and an unquestionable, universal right to self-determination

If you and I can interface “unmediated” and freely, and I decide to use that freedom to take your shit, you need a “coercive or alienating force” to correct the wrong. Controlling this force is the history of civilisation.

[jessaustin]

Does this model suggest that anarchy might be more tenable in situations of relative plenty? After all if everyone had enough shit there wouldn't be as much cause to take the shits of others?

Of course we'd still have to come up with activities to occupy all the "guard dog" will-to-power types when they no longer had good excuse to brutalize unfortunates. My suggestion would be a new violent sport! Since physical fitness is on the wane, probably something incorporating motorized scooters?

[mattmaroon]

People don't take things because they need them. They take things because it's a biological imperative. Lack of scarcity won't change the nature of an animal whose psyche is the product of millions of years of scarcity.

[jessaustin]

Evo-psych arguments are always weak, but this one would work slightly better if it were focused on violence rather than property. It isn't as if Homo sapiens evolved in an environment of flatscreen televisions and automobiles. A Neolithic tribe "owned" a couple of arrowheads and a big flat rock for cracking nuts. If they lost those they'd presumably just get some more.

More to the point, we didn't evolve in an environment that included police. Police were invented in the 19th century (for largely questionable purposes such as racism and anti-unionism). For hundreds of millennia before that, we survived without them. It's true that there existed various forces of "authority" over that period, but these were concerned about people taking the authority's shit. A cursory familiarity with history and archaeology convinces one that "coercive and alienating forces" rarely prioritize the interests of the general public.

[the_cyber_pass]

Just to comment on this. A common google search would have pointed out that your ideas about local police forces are largely incorrect. Police have been a thing for much longer. The big thing that happened in more recent history (Meaning 1700s) is separating them from the private market, the military or unregulated local mobs. You can trace the enforcers of civil law through force all the way back to ancient Babylon because civil unrest is bad for raising taxes. You could argue this were not police but rather various forms of 'authority,' but it's dishonest to say that they were not acting like police.

Easy example of this would be Cohortes Urbanae in ancient Rome which was specifically formed because the Praetorian Guard was too corrupt even by Roman standards at the time and mobs, gangs and 'random' violence were common.

[jessaustin]

The Romans had slaves. What are the chances that "Cohortes Urbanae" prioritized their interests? Do you argue here that police now are not different in significant ways from whatever those forces were? BLM might agree with you (me too!), but that isn't an argument against anarchism...

This is how fearful people fool themselves. They paint over the authoritarian excess of the past with anachronistic illusions of the present. Instead, they should realize that the unmistakable evils of authoritarians past indict those of the present, even if we tell ourselves that it's different this time.

[taneq]

"We are adaptation-executors, not fitness-optimisers."

[mattmaroon]

That is so incredibly true that you only have to explain it to people like anarchists who wish it weren't. By their logic men everywhere would have lost their sex drive the minute women got the pill.

There are just so many examples of predictable human irrationality attributable to this that it's hard to believe anyone doesn't understand it.

We keep executing our adaptations thousands of years after they cease to be useful.

[evanlivingston]

where did yo get that idea?

[aaron-lebo]

It's not crazy to think. Why do extremely wealthy people continue to strive for 100 billion instead of settling with 10? They had plenty at 1 million.

That's probably socialized, but maybe theres some animal hunger underneath it.

[lumberjack]

You are not wrong. Traditional anarchism, does not even attempt to talk about "coercion". In general, "anarchism" is about the dismantling of social hierarchies. It is a central tenant in anarchist ideology that hierarchies are bad. That is why there are various "flavours" of anarchism. Each emphasises some kind of hierarchy.

The piece in the OP has nothing to do with the century long tradition of anarchist thought.

[wavefunction]

That's true of Libertarianism as well.

[sigil]

On the contrary, libertarianism regards the law as force organized for the common defense and nothing more. [1] The protection of our negative rights is the one essential function of government in the libertarian view.

I've always been curious: how does anarchism reconcile your right not to be harmed with the supposed right of other individuals to do anything they please, including harm you? Do we even have a right not to be harmed? If we do, how is justice served -- can we serve it ourselves, or should it be delegated somehow? Or are these questions "out of scope" and justice is handled on a case-by-case basis that's not prescribed by anarchism?

[1] http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html

[wybiral]

> Do we even have a right not to be harmed? If we do, how is justice served -- can we serve it ourselves, or delegate it to others if we wish?

...And then the young anarchists assemble a small group for mutual protection and justice. And then these small groups begin to share resources and find the need for policies and infrastructure...

...And then they rebel against their new society because it imposes policies on their "freedom"...

[krapp]

Libertarians tend to accept that coercive force is sometimes necessary, particularly when it comes to property ownership and enforcing contracts, although they also sometimes disagree that a state and monopoly on force are necessary for the coercion.

To this end, Libertarianism sometimes seems to me like a weak or pragmatic form of anarchy.

[gbacon]

Libertarians reject the initiation of coercion or violence but accept forceful response — at the gentlest intensity necessary — to repel such invasions. For example, a libertarian would be fine with a homeowner shooting dead an armed robber who had broken in.

Ludwig von Mises was a minarchist, i.e., he advocated for the smallest state necessary. His student Murray Rothbard referred to himself as an anarchist or an anarchocapitalist.

Of course, Rothbardians and Marxists mean entirely different concepts when they use the term anarchist.

[yesenadam]

In this video[0], economist Richard Wolff talks about all the things he didn't learn studying economics at the US's most prestigious universities, because they were never mentioned. Fascinating talk. Towards the end he talks of a Spanish company run by its workers, which sounds like it has successfully transformed work for those people to something democratic, and, well, something free from what anarchists (and we all..uh 99% of us anyway) want to be free from. It sounds doable to extend that to other areas of life. Watch it! Highly enlightening ...and 'hope you can believe in' isn't that common nowadays.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc

[qwerty456127]

> How to make a political program out of anarchism?

Just give up radicalizing it. Accept the society AS IS as a starting point and start stripping the state of its powers and ambitions one by one. Read through the laws, legalize everything that can be legalized fairly safely (e.g. legalize drugs but don't hurry to legalize private atomic weapons :-)) at particular stage, remove requirements that are not really necessary (e.g. repeal copyrights enforcement but keep net neutrality). It is crucial to implement this process in a mindful and responsible way, i.e. avoiding dissolution of government institutions that do an important job and have no decent private alternatives established to the moment or repealing regulations that are there to limit the powers of corporations (which will certainly seek to establish tyranny over the nation as soon as the forces binding them weaken).

> We reject all societal processes that break that link — such as private property, exchange relations, division of labor, and democracy.

This is a way too radical idea that can hardly be considered constructive or viable. There can be no hope for a society anything close to real to survive and prosper with no body of power over them unless all its members respect property and interests, safety and privacy, freedom and dignity of other members the way they would like others to respect those of their own. Also division of labor is an absolutely natural thing, goods and services are to be subjects of free market, it is perfectly correct for a doctor to concentrate on healing people and expect the people to care about his needs in exchange so he won't waste time e.g. cultivating foods to feed his family.

The ultimate goal is not to destroy the system. It is to make every individual as free (keeping in mind that security is a precondition to freedom) as possible without infringing freedom of their neighbour, to decentralize and distribute power as uniformly as possible (while still letting and encouraging experts to make important decisions) and to establish Nash equilibrium so only minor fluctuations will occur and nobody will be able to gain enough power to become the new tyrant.

[kijin]

I respect anarchists for offering thorough criticisms of the democratic status quo that too many people take for granted.

I would even like to see a few thousand anarchists start their own society and try to put their theories into practice on an artificial island or something. Even if they all need to be rescued by UN forces at the end of the day, the experiment will provide the rest of humanity with valuable insights that philosophers and anthropologists can grapple with for decades to come.

For my taste, though, both anarchism and libertarianism seem to be based on an overly optimistic view of human nature. Maybe they'll become more realistic once we've either evolved or augmented ourselves to a much higher level of intelligence and conscience.

[kiliantics]

> I would even like to see a few thousand anarchists start their own society and try to put their theories into practice

There have already been many experiments in anarchy. They are usually not widely known, probably because the powers that be don't want people to be getting too many ideas. Most experiments get crushed by state power and don't last long.

Some famous examples include:

- Rojava Kurdistan in Northern Syria. This is a region of several autonomous communities, together comprising several million people, all self-determined but federated together with common values. Technically not anarchist but "Democratic Confederalist" - a new ideology proposed by former Marxist leader of Kurdish Worker's Party, Ocalan, who was inspired by anarchist Murray Bookchin. These are the guys with the female YPJ military that were kicking ISIS ass. This region is under heavy threat from Turkey and others and the international community refuses to recognise it, making trade difficult.

- Christiania in Copenhagen. This one is still going and has made deals with the state that result in some compromise but allowed them to maintain their autonomy. There are many similar squats/communes to this across Europe.

- Parts of Chiapas, Mexico. Somewhat under autonomous control by the Zapatistas

- Catalonia during the Spanish civil war. Taken advantage of by other socialists and the USSR and ultimately crushed by Franco.

- Ukraine Free Territory during the early stages of the Russian revolution. Eventually taken over by the soviets.

None of these situations needed rescuing from UN forces. It's usually the same people who make up the UN that are actually the ones that cause their experiment to fail.

[wav-part]

For my taste, though, both anarchism and libertarianism seem to be based on an overly optimistic view of human nature.

Democracy is too optimistic for some parts in the world as well. No system such as (Autocracy/Democracy/AnCap) can work without certain level of cooperation from everyone involved. True AnCap requires most and never-seen-before amount of cooperation but if possible, it does give/predict awesome results.

Maybe they'll become more realistic once we've either evolved or augmented ourselves to a much higher level of intelligence and conscience.

Some of us already have :).

[confounded]

By cooperation, do you not mean subordination?

[wav-part]

In autocracy, cooperation can be called subordination. But not otherwise.

[badosu]

Some of us already have :).

What do you mean by that?

[wav-part]

Its a jab. AnCap is next evolutionary stage of a society (atleast for some socities). Autocracy --> Democracy --> AnCap.

Not quite there ofcourse but they are getting there:

https://www.seasteading.org/floating-city-project/

https://www.freesociety.com/

[JetSpiegel]

I would argue anarchism has been tried in the past, it was simply called feudalism. Since it lead to the Dark Ages, there's not much support for it nowadays.

[danharaj]

That is a really hot take. Anarchism developed as a response to industrialization and the transformation of society caused by the adoption of capitalist modes of production.

[jessaustin]

Anarchy is opposition to arbitrary authority. Wasn't feudalism the opposite of that?

[TheCoelacanth]

That's absurb. Anarchism is a system completely without land ownership (i.e. "property is theft"). Feudalism is a system based almost entirely around land ownership (named after the word feodum meaning a grant of land in exchange for service).

[LyndsySimon]

> Anarchism is a system completely without land ownership (i.e. "property is theft")

Not all forms of anarchism subscribe to this.

[gbacon]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth

[wybiral]

Not to get too philosophical, but the problem with anarchism is rooted in our evolution and in natural selection itself.

Our strength and security comes from our ability to assemble and organize.

Then there's also some game theory involved with the state of the world right now. If we all agree to dismantle our organizational apparatus and military infrastructure then the last group to do so would be at quite an advantage to take over. Not too unlike the nuclear situation.

[rad88]

Human nature is exactly what we make of it and nothing more. Evolutionary forces tending our nations towards oligarchy, or more recently representative government, would be group selection which is largely debunked. In fact it's a much more dubious idea than that, since even group selection theorists don't assert that those forces apply at the scale of entire cities or nations.

[maxerickson]

The way to reconcile differing views is to discard them as principles and look at them as ideals and preferences.

Doesn't make for sweeping rhetoric though.

[mtgx]

It reminds me of this criticism of anarchy and extreme libertarianism:

http://thinkingofutils.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/anarch...

http://thinkingofutils.com/2017/04/freedom-bathtub-libertari...

Now onto my own criticism of the author's post:

> The concept of the “majority” is particularly troubling. By always accepting the will of the majority, democracy allows for majorities to have an absolute tyranny over everyone else. This means that in the winner-take-all context of democracy, minorities have no influence over decisions that are made. This is even worse than it seems, since the “majority” in any given situation is usually not even the majority of a population, but actually just the largest group of many minorities.

The U.S. FPTP winner-take all voting system is quite bad, as in any given district or city, and so on, not just a majority of people, but a minority can decide the representative for the whole district in Congress (which in case it's not clear, that's worse than the majority deciding the winner). It's not uncommon for people to become members of Congress with only 35% support of their constituents. I don't know what you call that, but I would say it's hardly democratic. I don't know how FPTP even made its way on the list of voting systems to be used in democratic countries.

As for addressing the similar criticism of majority rule in a democracy, there are ways to mitigate the problem of (real) minorities not having their concerns addressed at all, and that's also with more representative voting systems rather than winner-take-all voting systems.

For instance, with STV, you could elect 3-5 different representatives, each from a different party or independent. I think it would be way better in terms of addressing certain minorities' issues than the existing FPTP winner-takes-all voting system where either a Republican or a Democrat gets to represent a certain district for typically ~20 years (the long time periods are caused by both FPTP -- easy for the biggest party locally to continue winning -- and gerrymandering). Governments would have to be formed with coalitions, which means it usually won't be possible to form a majority government without taking the minority parties' or the groups of indepndents' concerns into account.

http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation

[mr_spothawk]

> At the scale of society I see Marxism as just as important.

what'd I just read? I think it was something like "100 million people died in the 20th century" because Marxism [1]

> How to make a political program out of anarchism?

nah bruh... the article is explicit:

> We are anti-political because we are interested in the self-organization of the power of individuals. This tension towards self-organization is completely orthogonal to democracy in any of its various forms.

[1] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/11/20/nicolae-one-hun...

[abiox]

the 100 million meme seems like such lame propaganda. when stalin starved ukraine, were those deaths "because of communism"?

[mr_spothawk]

well.. Stalinism is a subset of Socialism, i guess. [1]

and i don't know anything but lame propaganda, so i'm left to ask wikipedia about the starvation pieces too:

> Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[abiox]

to be clear, i wasn't suggesting that starving ukraine was fake or propaganda. my point is about how such an event is used in propaganda.

dictatorship is dictatorship, regardless of any claims to social or economic organization.

[MikkoFinell]

>I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life.

That's nice to hear, me and my friends feel that way too. BTW we're coming to take your stuff, enslave your family, and kill you of course. Isn't freedom from the oppressive state just great?