How would an anarchist society compare to statist and capitalist societies? It is apparent that hierarchical societies work well according to certain criteria. They tend to be extremely effective at conquering their neighbors and securing vast fortunes for their rulers. On the other hand, as climate change, food and water shortages, market instability, and other global crises intensify, hierarchical models are not proving to be particularly sustainable. The histories in this book show that an anarchist society can do much better at enabling all its members to meet their needs and desires.
The many stories, past and present, that demonstrate how anarchy works have been suppressed and distorted because of the revolutionary conclusions we might draw from them. We can live in a society with no bosses, masters, politicians, or bureaucrats; a society with no judges, no police, and no criminals, no rich or poor; a society free of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; a society in which the wounds from centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and genocide are finally allowed to heal. The only things stopping us are the prisons, programming, and paychecks of the powerful, as well as our own lack of faith in ourselves.
I prefer to give examples by citing anarchist successes (that don’t call themselves anarchist but clearly are)
All of these are populated by mostly non anarchist individuals, sometimes motivated by profit or selfish incentive, yet they organize non coercively
I might be misunderstanding something, but I think the modern internet is a lot closer to being anarchist than the early internet, unless you’re going back to the 1980s.
Today, anyone who can come up with the equivalent of a couple of cups of coffee a month can have their own domain name, email, and a web presence without being a master technologist.
The first domain name I acquired on behalf of a client in the 1990s required that I engage the services of the local ISP, pay US$200 annually to some outfit called Network Solutions, and make application by postal mail. The application had to include proof that we met the very rigidly enforced criteria for our TLD of choice.
Then we still had to have the relevant contract with the ISP for server space and email services, because we weren’t actually permitted to run our own servers without a separate, very expensive contract.
Building the website meant hand coding HTML, something beyond the reach of most.
The client was paying the equivalent of a decent used car every year, not counting that portion of my time allocated to the endeavour.
When the .ca domain first became available, it was available only to the federal government and companies doing extensive cross-country business. If the organization was not national in scope, it had to be content with one of the provincial subdomains, or maybe even on a municipal sub-subdomain, like .saskatoon.sk.ca
I am talking about the governance of the whole thing. The IETF is a volunteer organization. Most of the protocols that fuel the whole thing are coming from its RFC, they are not enforced, purely voluntarily. We owe them principles like the net neutrality. I am saying “early internet” because I don’t know if it is still like this but it very well may be. Are we lucky that these people believed in self-organization or was it doomed to happen this way, internet being too big of a project to be steered in a different fashion? We will probably never know.
You are talking about accessibility, which is an important aspect as well, but I would argue an orthogonal one: Google search is extremely accessible, it is far from being anarchist.
I see what you’re getting at, and I mostly agree. Yes, the whole thing is still resting on the goodwill and good behaviour of the participants.
But I don’t know that access is orthogonal to what you call governance in anarchistic systems. I think that balance of or limits to power requires ready access to all.
Ok, yes I agree, ease of access is important. I just mean that lowering the material barrier of entry is not enough to make a project anarchist in nature.
Got it. I agree.
And the vegan movement, it is driven by the stance that we are not master of animals and their oppression is unjust and a huge driver of ecological destruction. While not many may conscious identify as vegan anarchists it is in the spirit.
I dislike giving such examples because my interlocutor would argue that sure, these are shining examples of horizontalist success stories, but they’re not a country. Countries have criminals and need to defend themselves… [insert typical statist justification here].
There is some merit in their counter-argument: mine is not an anti-statist argument but an anti-capitalist one. If they can at least agree that we don’t need capitalism for production, I will agree that these examples do not prove that we can do without statism.
These examples also prove something that I find hugely interesting IMHO: there is a upper bound to the type of projects that can be handled by hierarchical structures. Some projects are too big and complex for a state or company and can only be done in an anarchist way. Microsoft once conceded that they could not compete with the number of coders on the linux kernel.
We don’t exactly have criminals but we have bad actors. We find ways to manage them. From spam filtering to defederation. We are mostly law abiding people so we can’t get much harsher than that. (Though conservatives seem to think “cancelling” is a fascist thing to do so I guess they would surely accept that such a punishment should be enough for an orderly society? /s)
Army-wise, that’s a dangerous argument because it easily slides into defending other authoritarians but guerrilla warfare is considered about 10x more troops-effective than regular armies. It is far less hierarchical, hinges on local support, focuses on defense. Not 100% anarchist, but not a giant leap of imagination to get it there.
You make sense. Personally, open-source has played a huge role in shaping my worldview. Pointing it out, however, does not seem to convince everyone. Recall that the guy who came up with the term, Eric Raymond, is a right-“libertarian”. On the other hand, Moxie Marlinspike is one our guys.
Don’t care about the people (I heard weird things about Moxie too), care about the ideas and the organizations they spawn. One of the strengths of open source (that may very well come from a libertarian mindset) is that you don’t need to agree with its (technically) anarcho-communist nature to participate in it. Just like you don’t need to be an enthusiastic capitalist to engage in a wage job at a private company or to rent a place to live, despite both these things being very capitalist in nature.
Open-source and internet are two things that most people use daily. Android, libreoffice, vlc, firefox (or even chrome) are known by most people. Explaining that they come from a volunteer work (some developers were paid by their employers to participate but their employers’ participation is voluntary) has been the start of several interesting discussion on my side.
International research is also an interesting one: who is the boss of international research? Who decides the priority in e.g. machine learning research? COVID also gave a recent down-to-earth example (assuming you are not talking with conspiracy theorists) of how medical research organizes globally pretty well without the need for a hierarchy.
We are presuming that we care about people though, aren’t we? The conversation started when you said that you give open-source as an example of anarchist free organization. This implies that you are giving it as an example to a person to convince them of the viability of anarchism, no?
You do not need to convince me of the viability of anarchism through examples like open-source or medicine. I am on this sublemmy because I already agree. We are discussing how to transmit our message to outsiders.
Moxie is… an interesting character (ever seen an anarchist become a CEO?) but he agrees (or at least agreed) with the ideas of anarchism. Actual anarchism, not “anarcho”-capitalism.
Cheers!
Ah sorry, I meant to not care about the person who authored/put forward some ideas, like Raymond or Marlinspike. Of course we care about convincing people!
I think I worded myself poorly. I was not giving Marlinespike and Raymond as examples to make a point about how open-source development is structured, but rather that it does not necessarily push you towards a particular political viewpoint (in contrast to you suggesting that it can be used to convince people of anarchism).
In truth, the only thing I can say about how OS influences people is that it tends to lead away from authoritarianism (and even that comes with caveats and exceptions, like Lemmy’s very own Dessalines).
Yes, participating in it does not necessarily align one consciously with anarchist ideals, just like participating in a private company does not necessarily make someone an enthusiastic capitalist, but the fact that so many people contribute or use open source allows us to use it as a practical example of the type of collaboration that we think should become the norm in an ideal society.