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- cross-posted to:
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If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?
If you answered “yes”, then you are used to acting like an anarchist!
Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?
If you answered “yes”, then you belong to an organization which works on anarchist principles!
Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?
If you answered “yes”, then you subscribe to the anarchist critique of today’s society — at least, in its broadest outlines.
Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parents told you)?
“It doesn’t matter who started it.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Clean up your own mess.” “Do unto others…” “Don’t be mean to people just because they’re different.” Perhaps we should decide whether we’re lying to our children when we tell them about right and wrong, or whether we’re willing to take our own injunctions seriously. Because if you take these moral principles to their logical conclusions, you arrive at anarchism.
Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?
If you answered “yes”, then, well, it looks like you aren’t an anarchist after all. But if you answered “no”, then chances are you already subscribe to 90% of anarchist principles, and, likely as not, are living your life largely in accord with them.
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And I would like to add that theanarchistlibrary.org is a fantastical free resource for anyone interested in anarchism.
Also that particular author (Graebber, mostly known for Bullshit Jobs and 5000 years of debt, also available for free on the anarchist library) is the one that made me understand the gap between anarchism and marxism and realize that far-left does not need to circle around marxism-leninism to go forward.
How do anarchists propose handling public works, healthcare, etc?
I think anarchism is a neat idea on paper, but how does it avoid becoming libertarianism in practice?
How do anarchists propose handling public works, healthcare, etc?
Well, how we do it now?
During the Spanish Civil War, anarchists socialized many industries. What they found out was that you could just remove people from most management positions and continue work as before. Very rarely a manager was actually needed, and when it was they would simply elect one of themselves to fulfill the role for a while.
Talking about healthcare specifically, in many countries that have public healthcare, the system is already decentralized. Because it needs to be, otherwise they can’t properly answer the demands from their communities. Again, you just need to remove pointless middle-men and other workplace hierarchies (like physicians being more important than nurses), and stuff tends to get better.
To my (self-labelled anarchist) view, anarchism is not a complete political doctrine and does not propose an off-the-shelf solution for all problems. It is a general direction: reduction of coercion in society. Hopefully to the point where none is required. “But what about criminals, prison, armed police?” yes, we don’t have non-coercive solution for everything. We just know that where no-coercive solutions exist, we should favor these. And that’s already a pretty radical program.
public works
I am not sure what you specifically project in anarchism, and whether you are talking about the actual construction work or the decision-making but these typically tend to work better when all stakeholders are involved in the project and there are already public works cooperatives out there.
healthcare
You mean health insurance or actual medical care? In my country (France) actual medical care is already done by a staff of people who accept a level of stress and a low pay they could easily escape given the qualifications required to work in a public hospital, but cling to it due to their will to accomplish a useful work. Remove administrative hassle and the need to pay for a right to live and they will happily work for free there:
Same applies for most teachers, researchers, caretakers, farmers, that I know.
There’s an entire essay just for how would anarchists do public service like healthcare. tl;dr, healthcare wasn’t even provided by states in the early modern period, it was provided by mutual aid societies. These societies had to be divested of power for states to monopolize the provision of services.
Community banking and funds mostly. Health-care similarly. It’s actually not really such a big problem to organize these things, so I always wonder why people give this as examples for why Anarchism wouldn’t work. If anything, large bureaucratic state systems make these more difficult and expensive.
I’m not trying to disprove anarchism, I’m trying to understand it.
I definitely think a lot of the inefficiencies that make people think we ‘need’ capitalism are caused by capitalism itself. People see these huge infrastructures and assume they’re necessary when they may well be so cumbersome that they detract from getting their stated task accomplished more than they contribute to it. Someone made a comment elsewhere about how much unnecessary management we have in our society, and I honestly think that’s a major component.
Work goes so much better when there isn’t someone breathing down your neck. Just a bunch of useless people lording over everyone for no reason and we waste sooo much time, effort, and resources on them.
If anything, large bureaucratic state systems make these more difficult and expensive.
I agree that the current system is broken, but I don’t know that this statement is inherently true. There are economies of scale, for example.
Why would that need a bureaucratic state apparatus? Anarchistic principles are extremely good at organizing things at scale.
I just want to move on to the part where we start burning things. We tried other things.
Does that count?
Made me think of the song “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette” by Cumbawamba:
Anarchist, and generally the whole far-left part of the spectrum can be divided between revolutionary (often vanguardists) and reformists (like yours truly). So no, anarchist does not always imply burning stuff (but can) and the old image of the anarchist bomb maker comes from the Propaganda of the Deed theory that is generally considered discarded.
Well I mean I want the fire to help push change. Not just random burning. But… Yeah I just really kind of want to start burning down billionaire’s houses.
It is fine to be a revolutionary, but one needs to have a clear goal with it. Violence just as a reaction to injustice usually just leads to an even more violent reaction. One need to have a goal apart from escalation, which usually leads to authoritarian military-like structures.
The goals are above my pay grade. I’m just down here on the ground doing the dirty work.
Look up insurrectionary anarchism
At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts.
I would add a third assumption: that capital tends to accumulate (while power and capital are exchangeable). Together with the “power corrupts” presumption, it gives a conclusion that power will too accumulate, and corruption will accumulate, unless the process is actively resisted - thus, a society without processes that balance the accumulation will eventually go bad.
Anarchy is great as long as nobody’s an asshole. That’s pretty much what government is needed for, to keep assholes in check. Of course, when the government is given too much power it becomes the biggest asshole…
Anarchy is the only way to stop an asshole.
If you’re an asshole in anarchism, you’ll fuck your neighbor’s life.
If you have a State or other giant hierarchy filling assholes with power, they will fuck everybody’s life. Case in point: every single billionaire alive.
Anarchy is. Period.
The rulers of ‘God’, laws, police, military, and so on, all know this. There is nothing ‘out there’ that somehow magically ‘govern us’. It’s all in your head, taught to you while you were young enough to make all that life-long beliefs. And it is rare for adults to then question those beliefs because that’s the way childhood and adulthood works, across species.
There’s nothing to the foundation of of our current society but ideas. And so it’s fragile AF - and what remains real underneath those stories is anarchy: people want to help each other and they know how to take care of themselves. Give them space, and they’ll be happy.
That’s why the folks who lord it over you come and beat the shit out of you, put you in a cage, or shoot you in the head if you get out of line.
Or even if you simply wish to opt out! Sure, you can go into the forest. But try to bring too many people with you and we’ll punch you and YOUR funny ideas into the pavement.
Anarchism is the act of always trying to throw the Ring into Mount Doom. Our ‘systems’ of rule, political machines, laws, police, borders, bla bla bla, are just different versions Sauron’s ring. They all want to use the Ring to help in some way, and all inevitably become his servants.
That was a nerdy AF analogy, but I dig it.
I’d argue that it’s a bigger problem when assholes are able to take over the positions of power they’re typically attracted to and make the lives of others miserable. I’d much rather assholes just be, like, kinda uncooperative but no more influential than anyone else.
Can you be more specific what you mean by asshole?
Because if someone has a shitty personality I just stop associating with them, like not inviting them to parties. An anarchist society ideally would greatly increase my autonomy when it comes to the decision on who I interact with.
For example: Third Mate Gregory Cousins. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t invite him to a party, but I can’t choose to not interact with what he caused.
Anarchy means those kinds of people that have the power to concentrate huge amounts of hydrocarbons, spill it, and get away with the consequences wouldn’t have that kind of power to begin with. It’s our current system that allows assholes to create massive harm on the level that regular people are unable to avoid
How does it prevent that?
Energy provision in an Anarchistic society would have to be much more decentralized, both due to environmental necessity and to prevent people being able to blackmail others though centralized control of the energy supply.
That this would also largely prevent these kind of disasters as there wouldn’t be such a concentration of a massive amount of hydrocarbons (or nuclear fuel for that matter) in one place, is more of a necessary side effect of that.
Of course, there would be a transitional period, but the Exxon Valdez story is also a story about worker exploitation and the company refusing to repair vital safety features (due to profit maximisation), neither of which would be acceptable in an Anarchistic society. It is likely that the disaster would have not happened if the workers would have not been not massively overworked and the collision radar would have been repaired in time (it was broken since months already, and deemed too expensive to fix).
“neither of which would be acceptable…”
And how does one reject that? Do you think profit maximization goes away under anarchy? You’re missing very basic parts of your utopia to deal with things when people don’t act perfectly, intentionally or not.
If there is no money (as a store of value, as opposed to an freely inflatable means of exchange) and no private property (as opposed to personal property), both of which is a given in an Anarchistic society*, why would anyone try to maximize profit? The entire concept of profit maximisation would be absurd in such a scenario.
And with no external force to maximize profit, why would a worker-owned cooperative that handles transport of hydrocarbons exploit their workers (i.e. themselves) or not do necessary repairs?
I think you don’t understand the basic idea behind Anarchism… it is precisely the idea that people can be flawed but society doesn’t incentive such behaviour and has many defences in place to prevent people from trying to amass power over others.
*as they can only exist when a state enforces these with violence
Asshole in the “danger to society” sense, not just the “they’re a jerk” sense.
I don’t know where you live but all the governments I’ve seen are full of assholes. As the sociologist and not anarchist Charles Tilly noted, government is organized crime. Some assholes thousands of years ago set up a protection racket and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. Every benevolent act by government merely legitimizes the violence they inflict.
I been trying to push this for quite some time. Choosing to be civil proves progress independent of any governance.
Well, that bunch of choices you made for others was painful to read, seems like you’re not…
Who made any choices for others?
We tried anarchy once, and then got hungry and develeoped civilization.
