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by WBrentWilliams
876 days ago
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Just a thought, based on a loose synthesis: I think the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson offers a lens to look at why "anarchism" is betrayed. There is something about being human that creates hierarchies. There is also something about being human that takes these hierarchies and pushes them to any given horizon. My idea being that any given utilitarian hierarchy, over time, becomes a differentiation to create class divisions. I think this lens can be used to resolve the focus of Graeber's criticism of "anarchism" and what it means to remove inequality from a human system. My own thesis is that when you remove any given inequality from a human system, a power vacuum is created; some other inequality expands to take the place of the removal. This happens when an inequality is reduced, as well. I am unclear as to why and the mechanisms of how. This does not mean that inequality should not be addressed. It simply means that cognition of the effect of removing or reducing the inequality needs to occur and any action taken be adjusted to address it. The only system, so far, that seems to be dynamic enough to handle this is "small-d" democracy in its various forms. These approaches are not without their criticisms. |
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It's not about being human, it's about being in large groups where horizontal, consensus-driven decision making becomes infeasible. We've known this since The Tyranny of Structurelessness came out (and formal research into Dunbar's number only solidified this basic intuition), anarchists just didn't get the memo.