this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Anarchism understood as a proper model and not just "chaos" is about horizontal and distributed power structures.
The whole idea is that no single person or group has a monopoly on power. Now if you are asking how do anarchist societies prevent people or groups like that from rising up and forming monopolies of power, there are a bunch of different answers. Ultimately it's about collective action and proper structure.
If your organization's rules allow for a single person to rise up and take over, it isn't formed correctly. It's like the Fediverse, no one server or person gets to make the rules for all the other servers or developers.
Everything is federated by the choice of the instances and ultimately the users. If they don't agree with how any instance is being run, they can start their own and run it how they want, federating with who they want assuming it is mutual.
Anybody can fork the project at any time, build it different, start a new instance, run it how they want, etc.
You build into your society, mechanisms that resist monopolies of power. It's like how your body's immune system has layers of protection against all kinds of germs.
Another example, in typical small company the structure is top-down with the owner usually being a single person with universal power over all their employees. They can hire and fire whoever they want whenever they want. They can shut down the company or change how any part of it operates whenever they want. Nothing in that company structure protects the employees from abuse by the owner.
There is no magic bullet to protect against everything, just like how your body despite being healthy and strong can still succumb to cancer, infection, poison, etc. That isn't a reason to just give up on being fit and healthy, because it is about improving your odds and trying to make your life on the average better.
I was going to engage in some debate with this, but after your last paragraph I no longer find it necessary.
It illustrates one of the nastier, but also more important of life lessons. No system or even choice is going to be without its own flaws and vulnerabilities, they'll just be different ones from system to system. So, it's less about any one system being "right", or even just "better", but instead "appropriate to the circumstances/environment/goals".
Once you acknowledge this, it becomes a lot harder to passionately defend any particular system, because you're no longer as eager to ignore its own unique vulnerabilities. I believe deeply in democracy and freedom of information for instance, but I cannot bring myself to ignore that it creates a vulnerability for us that someone like Xi Jinping, with his powerful control over the local information space, simply does not experience.
Authoritarian systems, on the other hand, have to deal with the very basic fact that there is nothing divine or magical about that man on top, he's as human as the rest of us. So, if you get rid of him, you may be able to take and keep his job. Where in a democracy you'd just have to face re-election within a few years.
Pros and cons, always, with pretty much everything. Then the next most important consideration imo is simply scale. Some systems work very well within very small scales, say, a small family. But when scaling these systems up, it can change the circumstances enough that their value changes.
To illustrate this I always like to use littering a banana peel. If just one person litters a banana peel, it is largely harmless. If, however, a million people litter banana peels all in one spot, you can actually create a potential problem where one did not exist before. Scaling the behavior up changes how we need to think about it. This has a lot of ramifications for business in the modern world, where scale is usually desirable. Also feeds into many civil engineering problems.
I think it is important to add that even though no system is perfect and every system has it's pros and cons, that doesn't make them equal. As soon as we define goals, for example equal rights, some systems will be better equipped at achieving those while others might be actively hostile to them.
IMO it's more important to talk about the specific elements of the system, because all the successful systems have used mixes of other systems.
I don't think you're saying anything contrary but I wanted to make one point clear.
The democracy we live under is not unique to capitalism. In fact, our current system has less democracy than an anarchist system would. Also capitalism doesn't have any requirement to be democratic. Whereas with anarchism, any dictatorship is directly against the core tenets of the system.
That being said, (I have not read enough theory to know for sure but) anarchism doesn't necessarily preclude the idea of having managers or even CEO's. It does preclude those positions having total power and control of an enterprise though. Dismantling the hierarchical structure of modern society doesn't mean having someone be a coordinator of a larger group isn't helpful. It just means that job isn't given greater power or more significance than those being coordinated. Our current idea of a CEO is very dictatorial, but that's not how it has to be.
Exactly. Syndicalism is an anarchist model and in it the union that owns the means of production may decide to have a leadership structure, but that leadership structure has to answer not just to their boss, but also to the collective. The union president might be heavily involved with the company president trying to ensure that the venture is working effectively and planning ahead while also doing right by its workers’ desires. The union leadership would likely be elected and able to either fire or call for the firing of the business leadership.
Oh, I never thought of the Fediverse being anarchic (anarchistic?), that's a nice thought (then again servers are mostly structured hierarchical with admins and mods and users?).
I'm not sure how well it translates into societies, though. I love the principles of anarchy, I strongly believe that there should be no one ruling over or deciding for other people but I'm not sure this would work in reality since I can just see how the people with the "big stick" (armies) would just invade us while we're endlessly debating what the best course of action is. I know this is a bleak outlook on the world but you can kind of see it happening now where Russia can just count on Europe and the US arguing among themselves (in their respective systems) while the dictatorship is just fucking shit up. I sure hope I'm proven wrong!
bear in mind here that i’m very much not well-versed in anarchist philosophy, but
i think even in systems like direct democracy (afaik a kind of anarchy because people directly vote on everything?) it doesn’t really scale and you end up needing to elect someone to make implementation decisions toward the overall goals of the society
the key is that it should be very easy to replace that person, and they should have no real “power” other than things that people would mostly come to the same conclusions about anyway - they’re an administrator, a knowledge worker, and their job is procedural
in the fediverse, we join servers whereby we agree to their rules. moderators and admins are a procedural role that is about interpreting and implementing those rules. we can replace them at any time by changing servers and our loss is minimal - less so on mastodon because of the account transfer feature! thus their power over us is always an individual choice and not something that is forced upon us either explicitly or implicitly
Servers are heirarchic, but heirarchy is optional; the lower level members are free to leave at any time.
It's not a perfect model, but it's decently close. If Lemmy had a way to distribute server ownership to a group of individuals, that would be even closer.
If I was a whiz at developing, I would love to build that kind of feature.
I understand your concern of external threats to an anarchistic society, but I would just remind you that plenty of centralized governments/societies have also been conquered by other centralized powers. Being centralized by no means protects you from that threat. I think the more relevant factor is just overall size of the opposing force.
It doesn't matter how weak hamsters are compared to you. If enough of them attack you endlessly, eventually you will succumb, if for no other reason than pure exhaustion lol.
However, there are clear examples IRL of far smaller and weaker decentralized forces successfully resisting a much more powerful centralized force. The VietCong vs the USA in Vietnam, the Mujahideen vs the USSR in Afghanistan, the American Revolutionary forces vs England, the French Resistance vs the Nazis, etc.
I would highly recommend the YouTuber, Anark. He has fantastic content discussing all aspects of anarchism, including defense. He also has links to many other great resources to learn about Anarchism.
thank you for explaining. This makes it a lot easier to grasp.
Do you have a source that slowly zooms in on the topic so I can read stuff that helps me get an idea of more concepts regarding this?
There's a lot of classic books on anarchy. I think Peter Kropotato[sic] has a lot of stuff written before the Russian revolution that goes heavily into why capitalism and feudalism both suck.
I mean, capitalism and feudalism is a nobrainer at this point (why they suck) but I'll check it out. thank you! :)
I’d like to thank you for taking your time to provide such a thorough answer
Thank you for reading it :)
I am five years old and I don’t understand anything you just said.