How Anarchy Works [Andrewism]
How Anarchy Works [Andrewism]
[yes, we got a new Andrewism video for Labour Day!]
“Anarchism - a political philosophy and practice that opposes ALL hierarchies along with their ‘justifying’ dogmas and proposes the unending pursuit of anarchy, where free association, self determination, and mutual aid form the basis of our society.”
This concept of free association is interesting to me as I’m not very familiar with it. How does it not devolve into warring gangs of people seeking to undo each other’s work?
For example, a group of builders perceives a need for more housing, so they want to build an apartment building at the edge of town. Another group who gardens there is opposed. Clearly there is a need for some process that mediates between these groups. But if not through consensus or democracy, how is this done? Free association seems great for things that are not controversial, but almost any large project is going to be controversial, and there will be a nearly constant need to resolve such disputes. How to do so efficiently and without hierarchical relations is one of the biggest challenges to anarchy, and I don’t see how free association solves this issue.
Anthropology has a lot to teach us on how people dealt with such large-scale endeavors without the state. If there's conflict, they find a mediator or perhaps hold a meeting between the two groups to hash these things out. Sometimes, two groups would go to war. But anarchy is not merely statelessness, it means a society of consent and collaboration without hierarchy. Previous forms of statelessness may see peoples going to war or exert hierarchy with one another over any sort of disagreement or conflict, but anarchy means means a commitment to figuring out how to settle conflict and disagreements without hierarchy. So yes, anthropology has a lot to teach us on how people dealt with conflict in healthy ways. Sometimes they'd settle conflict in violent ways, but our purpose is to learn from these and do better.
tl;d: how is this done? talk to each other and learn from how people mediated conflict without states.
Would love to see resources on conflict resolution from anarchic societies if anyone has them.
My MIL is a community mediator using nonviolent communication which I highly recommend people read up on if they are interested. It’s interesting and useful stuff.
Well I think part of the answer comes from having a society that is more interconnected than we currently have.
If there were people that were both part of the gardening group and part of the builder's group then those people would have the necessary common knowledge to be able to satisfy the needs of both groups.
That is part of why I think a society of anarchists necessarily needs people to be educated in ways that make them a lot more generalist than we are now (hence the emphasis most anarchists have with the idea of self-sufficiency).
Edit: Also in the cases where there isn't significant overlap between the two groups having a third group that does have knowledge of both of them participate in the decision making would also serve the same function.
Yeah I mean there are lots of possible mediation strategies but my experience is that having a formal process of who should be consulted and how disputes get settled does avoid a lot of conflicts and bad feelings. Of course, this does add complexity, places where hierarchies can creep in, and inefficiencies in solving community problems. So there is probably no one perfect system but we may need to experiment with lots of structures to see which has the best balance of features for each specific circumstance.
Maybe I misunderstood but Andrew seems to be indicating that there isn’t a need for formal groups to manage shared resources, and that such groups will naturally arise and disappear based on common interests. But I think there will naturally be factions with different priorities in terms of how common resources should be utilized, just as there are today. Perhaps as you say with a more developed sense of solidarity these problems will lessen but I have a hard time thinking they will disappear.
I am not sure I can envision how this free association concept would work in practice for these controversial issues, but I certainly am interested to see this principle in action on a small scale to find out.
Challenge the assumption: By other means but to a great extent, violence IS being done by our current housing system. Unless you are born into wealth: We're fucked 6 ways from sunday. There is no middle class, never was.
We have working class, and then we have elites. If you're not a C-level executive, you are no more secure...in tech I see many of my peers learning this the hard way with wave after wave of layoffs.
So don't ignore the deaths of, evictions of, destabilization of lives and mental well-being, for all of those working 2 jobs and still not able to make rent. Living in their cars, while exectutives call them lazy and entitled. Dehumanization: check.
In fact, We dont devolve into Anarchism -- we advance towards it. It is checks and balances turned up to 11, gardening the weeds against any heirarchy of oppresion that might attempt to emerge.
If any devolving is happening: "Fasicism is capitalism in decay" about describes it.
May we yet preempt it's barbarism.
Hierarchies are opposed, not mediating third parties nor organization. Ask ten different anarchists and you'll get twenty methods to approach your thought experiments.
Sure, I’m just wondering what people think about this. The video seems to imply that consensus and particularly majoritarian democracy won’t be necessary but I’m not sold on this.
Right? I mean, it all sounds great in theory except we know that people are opportunists and eventually will see a situation they can exploit that undermines the system.
It's the basic problem that as soon as someone starts a gang that is willing to violate the social contracts that motivate good behavior in an anarchy system the anarchy system doesn't have any mechanism ready to defend itself and has to rely on people being spontaneously able to band together and violate the tenants they are trying to uphold by organizing into a violent hierarchical organization capable of fighting back.
During the Ukrainian Revolution, there were all sorts of gangs that emerged that killed Jews and stuff. What did anarchists do? They killed those pogromists in turn. Under conditions of anarchy, there is no state that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to punish those who break the "social contract." Rather, there is a plurality of violence that various groups can inflict on offenders. If you fuck around, you will find out.
Is this a violent sort of life? Not really. It's not as if Indigenous or pre-state peoples live in violence all the time. Sure, violence did happen, so what?, violence happens all the time under state societies too. The difference is that without a state, people cannot call on a higher power to coerce so they have to rely on each other to keep each other safe. Besides, the people doing the raping, stealing, and killing in state societies are precisely the people protected by privilege and the state. Under conditions of anarchy, such privileges mean very little.
Read on black army.
I think you have a point and a decentralized system will only stay decentralized if it has practices and norms that actively combat the natural development of hierarchies. This is generally what we see in non-hierarchical forager societies which are generally the most successful examples we know of at putting these principles into practice. But at least historically, these societies have not been as successful at combatting hierarchical violence by outsiders. For this reason I think a larger real world anarchistic society cannot necessarily pursue maximum human freedom without considering economic efficiency, organized self-defense, etc. How to develop such institutions and practices without hierarchy is a largely unsolved question, and it may be necessary to learn by trial and error.