Our current socioeconomic system is basically built on many intersecting hierarchies of coercion, oppression and control - i.e. some measure of power you can use to make someone do something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. A few examples of those hierarchies include patriarchy, religious authorities, the state, and capitalism.
All of those hierarchies must be abolished. If any of them remain in place, then you will end up with exploiters and the exploited. Eventually, this will stratify over time, as we’ve seen through history a number of times - the rich get richer, accumulate wealth and power until it becomes unbearable, then the current ruling class are overthrown and replaced by a new ruling class.
We need to NOT create a new ruling class. We need to abolish the ruling class and NOT EVER REPLACE THEM.
That’s the mistake made by communism in the USSR - replacing the existing ruling elite with another ruling elite. No matter how cool and revolutionary the leaders of the revolution are, as soon as they have power, they WILL be corrupted by it.
So the solution to our shared problem is anarchism. We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.
Humans are the most co-operative animals in the world. We don’t act like it, because the powers that be discourage us from co-operating. Because if we co-operated, we’d immediately realize the problems we have are coming from above.
We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.
Any system that has any hope of being sustainable, after the destabilization of heirarchies, needs to distribute resources across and not from the top down. It’s exhausting watching capitalists and democratic socialists fight against each other in western countries, with little to no anarchist presence whatsoever, when they both miss the point in a pretty glaring way.
Genuine question, what happens in an anarchist utopia when your neighbors decide that they like your land? If you fight back en masse, doesn’t that involve creating a military with a hierarchy that’s ripe for seizing power? How can you maintain the social organization for building fighter jets or aircraft carriers or spycraft without those being taken over and used against the people? If you just don’t, what happens when your neighbors are a global superpower that has all that?
It seems even more impractical and idealistic than Communism, which at least has an answer to that.
There’s a lot of questions in there, and I’m genuinely really sorry to say, there’s way more than I can hope to address with the limited amount of time and energy I have, but I think you’re imagining an “anarchist state” or something like that - that’s still thinking with a non-anarchist mindset. There is no country to invade, there’s an amorphous blob of land, which I suppose another nation could attempt to impose itself upon, but in that case, all the working class needs to do is overthrow the new would-be autocracy. Why would a standing military force be more effective than an informal, organized resistance, fighting for their own land? You’re imagining pitched battles and the like, instead imagine trying to occupy land where there’s not really any clear military targets, but everywhere you attempt to impose control, your soldiers end up getting shot, stabbed, or having molatov cocktails thrown on them/their vehicles. Militarism does not protecting the people who live in a country, they’re a tool of the ruling class to fight other nations. This is just my opinion, though - ask ten anarchists, you’ll probably get twenty answers. We believe in creating a better society through consensus, which makes it a little tricky for anarchists to talk about solutions to specific problems on an individual basis.
That makes sense, except that a very simple solution to the “how do I occupy the land” is “kill everyone there”, since an anarchist place thing would most likely have less developped firepower since, like you said, militarism sucks for everyone not on top.
Thing is, I do really agree with the principles of anarchism, and I think we should strive for a greater devolution of power. Just, maybe in a different way than what’s often presented.
If we made an anarchist society and we all get wiped out by genocide, at least we would die as free men and women, fighting for our homes and our lives. In the present we die as slaves and give our lives to increase shareholder value.
People are so scared of uncertainty, and all of these “what if” questions are just thinly veiled fear and insecurity. I get it. But if we want to live in a better world, we need to find the courage to act.
I personally am fully capable of leading a fulfilling life, it’s what I’m doing right now.
I’m not throwing that away to be more “free”, it’s simply not worth the risk for me.
I will work to get my current society towards more like what I want it to be though. Remember, the UK went from absolute monarchy to democracy without a revolution, if they were able to do that it’s possible to do the same with other systems.
The key for any successful politically and economically equalized system… Is circular oversight. Committees arranged to observe and contribute to each others decision making. Shared and necessarily equal responsibilities.
Maybe this could work, but only if you divide the military across the committees. If it’s just an advisory role, it’s meaningless. That’s the problem we’re seeing with the Supreme Court and Congress in America.
Even with those safeguards in place, what’s to stop the committees from working together to turn on the people? Maybe this doesn’t happen immediately, but what about in 300 years across many changes of power?
It goes beyond oversight, it needs to be a flat structure, where no one person has authority over any other person. It’s not enough to create three groups, give them all power, and have them all watch over each-other, for example, because that would also inevitably lead to corruption. The only thing that can guarantee freedom, peace, justice, and equality for all requires the abolition of all power structures. We need anarchism.
But I can assert power over you by threatening you with a baseball bat. If I get a group of buddies with bats, we become the power structure.
You can’t eliminate power structures forever, they arise spontaneously in a population. You can’t abolish power structures because abolition requires a power structure to enforce.
The best you can do is devise power structures with multiple layers of accountability. So long as some people are bigger, stronger, meaner than others, power imbalances will exist. If you don’t have a structure to regulate those imbalances, warlords and mafiosos will make their own.
You’re missing a few major pieces of the puzzle here - why would you threaten me with a bat in the first place? Most crime is a result of inequal power structures to begin with. If all of our needs are met, why would we choose to be violent? Some crimes of passion may occur, but that’s not likely to create any hierarchies.
If we have an anarchist society, then we have already been successful at dismantling power structures. Any attempts to establish new power structures can be dealt with in the same way - in fact, in a much easier way, since they won’t have anywhere near as much pre-established power.
Revolution is not a single, one-off event. Anarchism requires permenent revolution, a commitment by the society to collectively prevent the formation of new power structures. It requires serious social changes that are likely to take at least a single generation, but probably longer.
why would you threaten me with a bat in the first place?
Some people are greedy, or jealous, or just want to be in power.
If we have an anarchist society, then we have already been successful at dismantling power structures. Any attempts to establish new power structures can be dealt with in the same way
That seems like circular logic that hand-waves the intrinsic difficulty of the task as a trifling detail. You’re assuming a solution exists, and then assuming that solution can deal with any new threats.
Anarchism requires permenent revolution, a commitment by the society to collectively prevent the formation of new power structures. It requires serious social changes that are likely to take at least a single generation, but probably longer.
That just leaves the tricky transition period. What do we do in the meantime? I think a single generation is massively underselling the timescale, what you’re describing is likely to take a century or more. You can’t build a system off of humans suddenly having heretofore unobserved commitment to the collective good.
We’re berry-picking primates advancing too fast for our nervous systems to keep up. Anarchism is a nice utopia to think of, but it isn’t much comfort for people living today.
Seems like your mind is made up! I think this is just going to be one of those “agree to disagree” situations. The answers to your objections can be found in the Anarchist FAQ, I’d recommend learning more about it before dismissing it!
On the contrary, my mind is constantly open and I’ve read quite a bit. But what I’ve read generally falls into three categories:
Totally hand-wavey, concerned more with guiding principles than actionable models. No attempt is made to describe how to devise a non-hierarchical system that fulfills the needs of the people.
Delusional, based entirely on people suddenly being way more cooperative and efficient in group decisions than they’ve ever actually been observed to be en masse.
Inconsequential, “non-hierarchical” is abstracted so far that most modern democracies could be described as such after relatively minor reform. These seem the most practical to me, like the proponents actually considered the mechanics of how the system would work in the material world.
I’m not trying to dismiss it, but everything I’ve read either makes it sound like a fantasy, or a minor change.
Again, humans are incredibly co-operative, but we’ve all been subject to brainwashing from childhood against our better natures. We can act against that brainwashing. It absolutely requires a social revolution - we need to be honest about our society and culture. If you think co-operation is delusional, I’d recommend learning a bit about paleolithic and neolithic human societies.
Anyways, I’m sure you won’t change your mind, the brainwashing is real, I get it, it’s tough. As long as you’re anti-capitalist, that’s fine with me, you’ll get there.
Our current socioeconomic system is basically built on many intersecting hierarchies of coercion, oppression and control - i.e. some measure of power you can use to make someone do something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. A few examples of those hierarchies include patriarchy, religious authorities, the state, and capitalism.
All of those hierarchies must be abolished. If any of them remain in place, then you will end up with exploiters and the exploited. Eventually, this will stratify over time, as we’ve seen through history a number of times - the rich get richer, accumulate wealth and power until it becomes unbearable, then the current ruling class are overthrown and replaced by a new ruling class.
We need to NOT create a new ruling class. We need to abolish the ruling class and NOT EVER REPLACE THEM.
That’s the mistake made by communism in the USSR - replacing the existing ruling elite with another ruling elite. No matter how cool and revolutionary the leaders of the revolution are, as soon as they have power, they WILL be corrupted by it.
So the solution to our shared problem is anarchism. We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.
Humans are the most co-operative animals in the world. We don’t act like it, because the powers that be discourage us from co-operating. Because if we co-operated, we’d immediately realize the problems we have are coming from above.
Any system that has any hope of being sustainable, after the destabilization of heirarchies, needs to distribute resources across and not from the top down. It’s exhausting watching capitalists and democratic socialists fight against each other in western countries, with little to no anarchist presence whatsoever, when they both miss the point in a pretty glaring way.
Genuine question, what happens in an anarchist utopia when your neighbors decide that they like your land? If you fight back en masse, doesn’t that involve creating a military with a hierarchy that’s ripe for seizing power? How can you maintain the social organization for building fighter jets or aircraft carriers or spycraft without those being taken over and used against the people? If you just don’t, what happens when your neighbors are a global superpower that has all that?
It seems even more impractical and idealistic than Communism, which at least has an answer to that.
There’s a lot of questions in there, and I’m genuinely really sorry to say, there’s way more than I can hope to address with the limited amount of time and energy I have, but I think you’re imagining an “anarchist state” or something like that - that’s still thinking with a non-anarchist mindset. There is no country to invade, there’s an amorphous blob of land, which I suppose another nation could attempt to impose itself upon, but in that case, all the working class needs to do is overthrow the new would-be autocracy. Why would a standing military force be more effective than an informal, organized resistance, fighting for their own land? You’re imagining pitched battles and the like, instead imagine trying to occupy land where there’s not really any clear military targets, but everywhere you attempt to impose control, your soldiers end up getting shot, stabbed, or having molatov cocktails thrown on them/their vehicles. Militarism does not protecting the people who live in a country, they’re a tool of the ruling class to fight other nations. This is just my opinion, though - ask ten anarchists, you’ll probably get twenty answers. We believe in creating a better society through consensus, which makes it a little tricky for anarchists to talk about solutions to specific problems on an individual basis.
I’d recommend you check out the anarchist FAQ if you have more questions - https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/index.html
That makes sense, except that a very simple solution to the “how do I occupy the land” is “kill everyone there”, since an anarchist place thing would most likely have less developped firepower since, like you said, militarism sucks for everyone not on top. Thing is, I do really agree with the principles of anarchism, and I think we should strive for a greater devolution of power. Just, maybe in a different way than what’s often presented.
If we made an anarchist society and we all get wiped out by genocide, at least we would die as free men and women, fighting for our homes and our lives. In the present we die as slaves and give our lives to increase shareholder value.
People are so scared of uncertainty, and all of these “what if” questions are just thinly veiled fear and insecurity. I get it. But if we want to live in a better world, we need to find the courage to act.
I personally am fully capable of leading a fulfilling life, it’s what I’m doing right now.
I’m not throwing that away to be more “free”, it’s simply not worth the risk for me.
I will work to get my current society towards more like what I want it to be though. Remember, the UK went from absolute monarchy to democracy without a revolution, if they were able to do that it’s possible to do the same with other systems.
None of us are free until all of us are. If you’re happy benefiting from slave labor, I don’t have anything more to say to you.
The key for any successful politically and economically equalized system… Is circular oversight. Committees arranged to observe and contribute to each others decision making. Shared and necessarily equal responsibilities.
Maybe this could work, but only if you divide the military across the committees. If it’s just an advisory role, it’s meaningless. That’s the problem we’re seeing with the Supreme Court and Congress in America.
Even with those safeguards in place, what’s to stop the committees from working together to turn on the people? Maybe this doesn’t happen immediately, but what about in 300 years across many changes of power?
It goes beyond oversight, it needs to be a flat structure, where no one person has authority over any other person. It’s not enough to create three groups, give them all power, and have them all watch over each-other, for example, because that would also inevitably lead to corruption. The only thing that can guarantee freedom, peace, justice, and equality for all requires the abolition of all power structures. We need anarchism.
But I can assert power over you by threatening you with a baseball bat. If I get a group of buddies with bats, we become the power structure.
You can’t eliminate power structures forever, they arise spontaneously in a population. You can’t abolish power structures because abolition requires a power structure to enforce.
The best you can do is devise power structures with multiple layers of accountability. So long as some people are bigger, stronger, meaner than others, power imbalances will exist. If you don’t have a structure to regulate those imbalances, warlords and mafiosos will make their own.
You’re missing a few major pieces of the puzzle here - why would you threaten me with a bat in the first place? Most crime is a result of inequal power structures to begin with. If all of our needs are met, why would we choose to be violent? Some crimes of passion may occur, but that’s not likely to create any hierarchies.
If we have an anarchist society, then we have already been successful at dismantling power structures. Any attempts to establish new power structures can be dealt with in the same way - in fact, in a much easier way, since they won’t have anywhere near as much pre-established power.
Revolution is not a single, one-off event. Anarchism requires permenent revolution, a commitment by the society to collectively prevent the formation of new power structures. It requires serious social changes that are likely to take at least a single generation, but probably longer.
Some people are greedy, or jealous, or just want to be in power.
That seems like circular logic that hand-waves the intrinsic difficulty of the task as a trifling detail. You’re assuming a solution exists, and then assuming that solution can deal with any new threats.
That just leaves the tricky transition period. What do we do in the meantime? I think a single generation is massively underselling the timescale, what you’re describing is likely to take a century or more. You can’t build a system off of humans suddenly having heretofore unobserved commitment to the collective good.
We’re berry-picking primates advancing too fast for our nervous systems to keep up. Anarchism is a nice utopia to think of, but it isn’t much comfort for people living today.
Seems like your mind is made up! I think this is just going to be one of those “agree to disagree” situations. The answers to your objections can be found in the Anarchist FAQ, I’d recommend learning more about it before dismissing it!
On the contrary, my mind is constantly open and I’ve read quite a bit. But what I’ve read generally falls into three categories:
Totally hand-wavey, concerned more with guiding principles than actionable models. No attempt is made to describe how to devise a non-hierarchical system that fulfills the needs of the people.
Delusional, based entirely on people suddenly being way more cooperative and efficient in group decisions than they’ve ever actually been observed to be en masse.
Inconsequential, “non-hierarchical” is abstracted so far that most modern democracies could be described as such after relatively minor reform. These seem the most practical to me, like the proponents actually considered the mechanics of how the system would work in the material world.
I’m not trying to dismiss it, but everything I’ve read either makes it sound like a fantasy, or a minor change.
Again, humans are incredibly co-operative, but we’ve all been subject to brainwashing from childhood against our better natures. We can act against that brainwashing. It absolutely requires a social revolution - we need to be honest about our society and culture. If you think co-operation is delusional, I’d recommend learning a bit about paleolithic and neolithic human societies.
Anyways, I’m sure you won’t change your mind, the brainwashing is real, I get it, it’s tough. As long as you’re anti-capitalist, that’s fine with me, you’ll get there.