How would you reach consensus between hundreds of millions of people?
Look, I am sympathetic to the cause behind anarchism but it doesn’t work because it insists on ignoring biological realities. We need to look no further than our ape cousins to see how some hierarchical structure is inherent to our society. Only through the existence of a state can we reduce hierarchy and increase equality.
A stateless society wouldn’t last 10 minutes before establishing a state.
Ape hierarchies, at least within the troops, are mostly about mating not resource distribution. It’s not like the alpha male gets first pick of the fruit and all the other chimps wait until he’s done and then go in hierarchical order, they just disperse and grab what they can.
If you want to go down an essentialist path most pre-agricultural societies were anarchic. There may be a chief but they “ruled” at the discretion of the tribe. The chief, or anyone really, couldn’t hoard resources because
they couldnt monopolize violence and coerce people since there’s no specialization in anything much less violence so violence becomes a numbers game.
There’s only so much you can carry. Pre agricultural tribes were nomadic mostly and when the tribe moves camps you have to carry everything with you. So even if you were able to hoard enough food that won’t rot you won’t be able to carry it to the next camp.
Because of the above, wealth isn’t really a thing. This forces cooperation because without wealth, the individual can’t protect themselves from hardship. Selfish individualism only works if you’re able to build up some wealth to act as a buffer for leaner times. If you don’t have that wealth then you’re reliant on your social connections so you tend to cooperate and redistribute because it’s in your best interest to stay in good standing with the group so they will help you in harsher times.
All this changes with agriculture and the invention of wealth, first in grain then in gold and then stocks etc. Now your dependence on society is directly porportional to how much wealth you have, to the point where really rich people can fuck off to a cabin or island and never work or contribute to society ever again.
Violence specialization also becomes more or less a thing, increasing up until the invention of firearms at which point it becomes more of a numbers game and the hierarchies lessen.
All of this is to say that hierarchy is not natural, but the result of the ability to accumulate wealth combined with violence specialization and monopolization. If we get rid of those two concepts then anarchy may take over, how we do that in the modern world is another question.
I have a theory about us returning to our natural state as our end game, but I haven’t put it down to paper yet. That being said, for now, it’s either all the good things industrialization has brought (along with the bad of course) or we return to the short brutish lives we lived before agriculture.
Anarchy at this point has no real way of being implemented without another state forming the moment we decide we can do better than die short tragic lives.
If might makes right a state will end up forming anyways. A populist commune is still a state. Anarchy is not possible in any sense of what one might describe as a functional society. As soon as there’s a society a state will form.
But that’s also not how chimpanzee society works anyways, since mostly it’s an alpha challenged by a younger stronger chimp who takes their place and makes sure everyone else follows the rules. They even have something like a police force.
It’s a government, but it isn’t necessarily a state. Regardless, Anarchists aren’t against all forms of government. The media’s version of total chaos is not what Anarchists are trying to create.
It’s not one big council but a confederation of councils. I like the idea of fractal democracy. Like a huge river branching into smaller ones and when you zoom in, these smaller ones branch again and again. You have councils on many levels, each making decisions, delegating to the next level and being recallable from below.
Decisions are made on the lowest level possible so you don’t go through all the layers normally. But not getting anything done is a common cliche about anarchist organization, including from people who’ve been there.
Still, closed contemporary examples are Rojava and Zapatistas. In Rojava, for example, they have councils of ethnic minorities so when the main council makes racist policies, the minority council can intervene.
I agree with you in that we cannot have a society without some form of state, but I think the idea is that we would have small community governments with more or less direct democracy.
Also, bio-essentialism? Really?
I guess you can call it that but as I understand it bio-essentialism denies that society has any roles at all in shaping the individual. For me there’s obvious environmental pressures that force us to act a certain way in order to survive which in turn shapes us as individuals and our societies. Of course I’m talking back to the very first human societies, but all modern societies by necessity must trace their origins there. But at a certain point we started to add rules that are based on idealized humanity, divinity, which is in my view inherently hostile to human nature.
We are animals and we have no real way to discern instinct from rational. For all you know every “rational” thought you’ve ever had is actually just an instinct. How would you be able to tell that it isn’t? But that’s neither here nor there, my point is we need to form societies that are sympathetic to our biological realities, instead of societies formed on moral values sourced from anti-human religions or idealized human religions. We would be much much happier.
I know people don’t like these type of stances because they are sometimes used to exclude trans people, or to justify racism but that’s just using science to arrive at the wrong conclusions.
How would you reach consensus between hundreds of millions of people?
Look, I am sympathetic to the cause behind anarchism but it doesn’t work because it insists on ignoring biological realities. We need to look no further than our ape cousins to see how some hierarchical structure is inherent to our society. Only through the existence of a state can we reduce hierarchy and increase equality.
A stateless society wouldn’t last 10 minutes before establishing a state.
Ape hierarchies, at least within the troops, are mostly about mating not resource distribution. It’s not like the alpha male gets first pick of the fruit and all the other chimps wait until he’s done and then go in hierarchical order, they just disperse and grab what they can.
If you want to go down an essentialist path most pre-agricultural societies were anarchic. There may be a chief but they “ruled” at the discretion of the tribe. The chief, or anyone really, couldn’t hoard resources because
they couldnt monopolize violence and coerce people since there’s no specialization in anything much less violence so violence becomes a numbers game.
There’s only so much you can carry. Pre agricultural tribes were nomadic mostly and when the tribe moves camps you have to carry everything with you. So even if you were able to hoard enough food that won’t rot you won’t be able to carry it to the next camp.
Because of the above, wealth isn’t really a thing. This forces cooperation because without wealth, the individual can’t protect themselves from hardship. Selfish individualism only works if you’re able to build up some wealth to act as a buffer for leaner times. If you don’t have that wealth then you’re reliant on your social connections so you tend to cooperate and redistribute because it’s in your best interest to stay in good standing with the group so they will help you in harsher times.
All this changes with agriculture and the invention of wealth, first in grain then in gold and then stocks etc. Now your dependence on society is directly porportional to how much wealth you have, to the point where really rich people can fuck off to a cabin or island and never work or contribute to society ever again.
Violence specialization also becomes more or less a thing, increasing up until the invention of firearms at which point it becomes more of a numbers game and the hierarchies lessen.
All of this is to say that hierarchy is not natural, but the result of the ability to accumulate wealth combined with violence specialization and monopolization. If we get rid of those two concepts then anarchy may take over, how we do that in the modern world is another question.
I have a theory about us returning to our natural state as our end game, but I haven’t put it down to paper yet. That being said, for now, it’s either all the good things industrialization has brought (along with the bad of course) or we return to the short brutish lives we lived before agriculture.
Anarchy at this point has no real way of being implemented without another state forming the moment we decide we can do better than die short tragic lives.
When a monkey hoards all the bananas, the other monkeys kill him and share the bananas. Anarchy is natural.
If might makes right a state will end up forming anyways. A populist commune is still a state. Anarchy is not possible in any sense of what one might describe as a functional society. As soon as there’s a society a state will form.
But that’s also not how chimpanzee society works anyways, since mostly it’s an alpha challenged by a younger stronger chimp who takes their place and makes sure everyone else follows the rules. They even have something like a police force.
It’s a government, but it isn’t necessarily a state. Regardless, Anarchists aren’t against all forms of government. The media’s version of total chaos is not what Anarchists are trying to create.
Here’s some more information if you want it: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionA.html#seca1
It’s not one big council but a confederation of councils. I like the idea of fractal democracy. Like a huge river branching into smaller ones and when you zoom in, these smaller ones branch again and again. You have councils on many levels, each making decisions, delegating to the next level and being recallable from below.
That just sounds like nothing will ever get done, but it would be worth simulating. Maybe it is good, who knows.
Decisions are made on the lowest level possible so you don’t go through all the layers normally. But not getting anything done is a common cliche about anarchist organization, including from people who’ve been there.
Still, closed contemporary examples are Rojava and Zapatistas. In Rojava, for example, they have councils of ethnic minorities so when the main council makes racist policies, the minority council can intervene.
I agree with you in that we cannot have a society without some form of state, but I think the idea is that we would have small community governments with more or less direct democracy. Also, bio-essentialism? Really?
I guess you can call it that but as I understand it bio-essentialism denies that society has any roles at all in shaping the individual. For me there’s obvious environmental pressures that force us to act a certain way in order to survive which in turn shapes us as individuals and our societies. Of course I’m talking back to the very first human societies, but all modern societies by necessity must trace their origins there. But at a certain point we started to add rules that are based on idealized humanity, divinity, which is in my view inherently hostile to human nature.
We are animals and we have no real way to discern instinct from rational. For all you know every “rational” thought you’ve ever had is actually just an instinct. How would you be able to tell that it isn’t? But that’s neither here nor there, my point is we need to form societies that are sympathetic to our biological realities, instead of societies formed on moral values sourced from anti-human religions or idealized human religions. We would be much much happier.
I know people don’t like these type of stances because they are sometimes used to exclude trans people, or to justify racism but that’s just using science to arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Yeah, I can agree to that.