My answer to the concept of “justifiable hierarchies”
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how you would propose preventing hierarchies from forming
Well that’s very precisely what anarchism is about: a collection of mental tool and individual/collective strategies to sabotage all forms of domination.
hierarchical organization tends to outcompete one that’s non hierarchical
That is true. Most autonomous communes have been assimilated or exterminated over the years. Contrary to popular belief, the middle ages were a rather free time for those people who lived far away from the centers of power. Nowadays, nobody can escape State control. This state of things was obtained through a mix of technological progress (gasoline motors considerably expanded the reach of State control) and progressive narrative (“public school is mandatory for the good of the children”).
It seems to me that many anarchists work of an assumption that majority of people will have a similar mindset to their own and choose the anarchist approach voluntarily.
Many anarchists are very skeptical/defiant and would rather on a daily basis only interact/cooperate with other anarchists (affinity) because they assume other people have an opposite mindset. However, despite all our formatting from years of school and media propaganda, most people in practice agree with anarchist principles when faced with actual situations, for example:
- why should the municipality decide to tear down a public park to build an apartment building, when most neighbors are opposed?
- why should we go to the police when we perfectly know nobody’s getting justice from that? in case of clear abuse, let’s involve the community to find justice, and if we can’t because justice is denied on one side, revenge is always an option
- why are we listening to an asshole who’s got no clue what he’s talking about, when there’s plenty of knowledgeable good-will people in our ranks?
- why should one of us get paid when others are volunteers? why should anyone be paid more than someone else? hell, why should anyone be paid at all if we’re in it together?
- etc…
Many people have argued in the past that in nature humans and other species tend towards anarchism (disinterested cooperation). That was the main point of Kropotkin’s Mutual aid, or David Graber’s Are you an anarchist? the answer may surprise you.
Despite my criticizing “nature” as a valid concept at all, i do believe most humans tend to be compassionate and critical by default, and it takes considerable amount of resources to indoctrinate people into behaving otherwise. For example, it takes many years of public schools to “teach” kids helping one another is cheating… and some like me will never “learn” ;)
Any ideology that aims to be successful has to be able to effectively compete with and hold its own against others.
Competing is not exactly the word. But authoritarian systems and libertarian capitalist communes tend to exterminate alternatives, so we do have to be prepared. However in anarchist thought/practice this is usually understood as specific of a specific context (power balance). Two examples:
- a single person holding bigoted/hateful views in a public assembly is not a problem, as long as this person is understood by everyone else to be in the wrong ; a fascist propagandist is a problem in a society where their voice has credibility
- a libertarian capitalist community is not a problem as long as it’s not aggressive to other communes, because if other communes around keep an open door for refugees, nobody will ever want to be exploited by this people ; a proliferation of capitalist communes would be a problem because anarchists would be isolated and wage slavery would be the norm, not the exception
- etc…
About defending ourselves, popular self-defense is an important notion for anarchists. Basically, it’s the idea that most conflicts can be resolved through non-violent means (deescalation and community accountability) but we should have the power to defend ourselves and our communities violently if the need arises. Both aspects are core principles of popular self-defense.
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There isn’t much demonstrated success applying this in practice however.
There is and there was. That most anarchist communes have been eradicated by authoritarians of all stripes doesn’t mean they weren’t successful. The two last ones to fall in the past few years, la ZAD and Exarchia, were really amazing communities where one could live without money and (mostly) without oppression.
they were still very much under state control
It depends. State control was widely limited by (lack of) technological means. People living in the mountains/swamps were mostly rid of State control because there was no gasoline to take an army up there. And whatever control the State had, they didn’t have cameras on the streets and a television spitting lies in every home to exert their control.
I’m not idealizing the middle ages, there were a lot of problems. But free communes and peasant uprisings were a thing back then. Can we say the same today in the western world?
Feudalism wasn’t any closer to anarchism than capitalism.
Definitely not. My point was simply that back then, people could technically evade feudalism by fleeing from the centers of power. While evading capitalism today is mostly impossible (or please show me how).
Perhaps Zapatista would be the closest example, although they don’t consider themselves anarchist. Yet, even they only managed to carve out a niche for themselves within of a capitalist state.
From my (limited) understanding of the zapatistas, they are indeed an anarchist movement (from my definition). They are building dual power from the ground up without higher authority.
What really sets zapatism apart from other marxist revolutions, is that the armed branch of the revolution (EZLN) explicitly recognizes they are not representative of the people and the people should decide for themselves. EZLN is only here to protect the revolution against outside threats, and does not worry about internal politics.
This healthy self-criticism and strong separation of powers is what enables the movement to build concrete autonomy, whereas revolutionary avant-garde (of the past) have actively sabotaged revolutionary efforts (eg. bolsheviks taking power away from the soviets, into the hands of the State).
Also it’s not a small niche. Zapatist communities are huge, and are well connected to the social struggles of the urban centers. As recently as last year, the movement announced the creation of new autonomous regions (caracols) so it’s still growing.
there have been numerous successful ML revolutions that liberated millions of people across the globe
And killed/enslaved millions of others. “Liberation” is not how people in the USSR/Spain/China experienced it: see Cronstadt/Makhnovtchina for example of true revolutionaries rising up against the counter-revolutionary bolshevik tyrants for social justice and self-determination (spoiler: they were massacred). If you’re interested in that, Emma Goldman has very detailed, first-hand accounts of her disillusions with the Russian revolution and the bolshevik dictatorship (of the proletariat, or so they say).
The first question that needs to be asked is how such a system can be overthrown in order for something different to be possible.
For me the first question is how can we avoid reproducing this, personally and as communities. Overthrowing a system of oppression to replace it with another one is of no interest to me. Whether i’m placed in a concentration camp by the capital’s police or the people’s police makes no difference to me. Burn all prisons and police stations, then we can start to think differently about living together as a society.
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It doesn’t matter how amazing these communities are if they’re unable to defend themselves from external threats effectively.
I strongly disagree. What matters is living by our ideals everyday and if that means death, so be it. By focusing on remote end-goals instead of today’s praxis, you are reproducing the worst there is in humanity. A conqueror’s mindset who wants to impose their worldview on everyone else in the name of socialism, is the worst enemy of actual socialism.
The Amish exist in the western world, but most people are choosing not to live that way.
The Amish only exist in the USA to my knowledge, and enjoy a certain exceptional privilege of cultural exception there from my understanding. I’ve never heard of Amish sovereign lands being threatened by huge corporations supported by the USA armed forces, as is often the case with indigenous nations. Also many people in the western world choose to live like that, but in countries like France suffer from strong political persecution.
Lords demanded tributes from villages on their lands, and those who failed to produce it would suffer severe consequences. People of course could run to live in the woods, but they can do that today exactly the same way.
Lords were not everywhere ; there were free communes as well. Running into the woods was an option, but barely is nowadays. People who try to live peacefully on the countryside, detached from capitalist society, are repressed by the State apparatus who comes and destroys their homes ; at least so is the situation in France, where DIY housing is considered unsuitable housing and destroyed by police forces on authority of the préfet ; yes, even on private properties in case you were wondering.
The armed branch in Marxist revolutions also consists of the people
Sure. Any group of people consists of the people. A bosses union also consists of the people. Does that make them representative of the entire population? Fact is the zapatista militias don’t trust themselves to become the enlightened vanguard guiding the people (healthy self-criticism), and they actively tell everyone to build their own community power, not trust some other authority. That’s what, in my understanding of the word, makes them anarchists.
You speak out of sheer ignorance here if you think that the people of USSR and China were not liberated by their revolutions.
I don’t speak out of personal experience because i was born and raised in France. However, i have met enough political refugees from Marxist-Leninist state capitalism to know there was no communism in Russia. If you don’t want to see the countless counter-revolutionary crimes of your own country, too bad for you, the rest of the world remembers. To me, placing a “communist” label on a bloody dictatorship where the workers/peasants have no power and no rights is the worst crime against communism, because it’s not only the exact opposite of communism (totalitarianism), it’s an insult to the very idea of communism.
you’re just making a false equivalence here.
What false equivalence? I genuinely don’t care if i’m interned/executed by capitalists for being an anarchist, or if i’m being interned/executed by marxist-leninists for being an anarchist. I will fight for freedom and equality until the end.
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My answer to the concept of “justifiable hierarchies”
Yeah don’t pull the child back that wants to run onto the street. /s
Hello dear leninists, maoists and authoritarians of all stripes. This was posted in /c/anarchism so please keep your downvotes to yourselves. You are only welcome here to engage in insightful criticism of our respective formatting, not to spew your hate and spit on us.
If you come here to judge us, please take a fucking look in your own backyard. There’s some fucked up shit to dig over there ;)
Sometimes I think it was a good idea that chapo.chat just completely disabled the downvoting feature, being forced to write a response is much more conducive for fostering discourse than being able to downvote and move on.
Even though I consider myself a ML, I agree with anarchists on the notion that every hierarchy has to have a strong justification to exist (and I really hope this is not a controversial stance among us). Now what I don’t understand is, how does a fully anarchist society form and maintain itself without reintroducing some form of hierarchies? If you find a critical mass of like-minded individuals to form an anarchist commune somewhere, that land is gonna belong to someone, who probably won’t give it up willingly. So that will likely be the first step where some form of coercion has to be employed.
Afterwards, it has become increasingly obvious, that a liberal society with free speech absolutism and tolerance for all dissenting viewpoints is not equipped to deal with fascist ideologies. It is my understanding that without exercising any form of authority it will not be possible to suppress fascist groups from forming, and so a society without hierarchies would share that problem. Moreover, the wreckers could also come from a hostile state, for example an imperialist state who has to see the anarchist project fail to maintain its legitimacy. How can you prevent a foreign actor from doing something like COINTELPRO without having a intelligence apparatus on your own?
Unfortunately, a intelligence community almost immediately introduces some form of hierarchy, because you have to limit the flow of some information. You cannot for example let your suspicion that some person is a foreign agent flow freely, because that might tip them off. Additionally, foreign agents will have a strong incentive to infiltrate your intelligence community, necessitating some kind of operational security, something that I would consider very authoritarian.
Now, I agree that having such an institution introduces a huge risk, and there have to be mechanisms in place to recall the leadership by popular demand fast and readily, but I think not having it is not viable.
Similarly, in the short to mid term, it will be necessary to maintain an armed force. This could, of course, take the form of a citizens militia, you could even make a strong argument that it should. But even then, these units usually have to have some kind of leader to ensure swift decisions. These leaders should of course be elected, possibly by their direct subordinates, and again, leadership must be easily revocable. But is this not a hierarchy in its purest form?
Is there an anarchist, hierarchy-less solution for those problems?
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I have been thinking about this a lot in other area than politics but I am unconvinced that the hierarchies vs non-hierarchies worldview is a productive lens through which to view the problems anarchism attempts to address.
Do anarchists actually define precisely what a hierarchy is? Further, is the difference between coexisting hierarchies (multiple hierarchies with the same elements existing simultaneously) and “monotheistic” hierarchies that attempt to rationalize all transactions between their elements within their framework?
My understanding (a very incomplete one, please feel free to educate and link to relevant stuff for me!) is that anarchism is supposed to function like murmurations of starlings where coordination between many individual elements arises spontaneously without any centralized directive. It seems confusing to me though to use the “hierarchy vs non-hierarchy” lens since there are many hypothetical and real human systems that might appear to be organized through top-down directives but actually arise in a fashion similar to murmurations of starlings (and vice versa, one example being people trying to fight against colonization without decolonizing their minds).
I feel like anarchism has more to do with the ongoing voluntary consent given by individuals to the systems they participate in than the actual details of those systems. Idk, I just feel like talking about “hierarchies vs non-hierarchies” leads people to imagine anarchism wants starlings to fly around chaotically and not form murmurations, not look at the starling in a murmuration and ask “is this individual consenting to this movement?” and then look at the larger murmuration and ask “is this movement a confluence of desires or a network of control?”.
Do anarchists actually define precisely what a hierarchy is?
I’m unaware of a formal definition, but most (all?) of anarchist literature touches on the different aspects of hierarchy and domination.
coexisting hierarchies
Some people call that kyriarchy, but yes intersectional analysis is definitely part of modern understanding of anarchism. It can be traced back to the 19th century with a lot of female anarchists denouncing their male anarchist comrades fighting bosses in the streets, yet behaving like bosses themselves at home (see Emma Goldman, Lucia Sanchez…)
anarchism is supposed to function
Anarchism is not a program and does not have a preset way to function. Anarchism is constant criticism/sabotage of all forms of domination.
appear to be organized through top-down directives but actually arise in a fashion similar to murmurations of starlings
Delegation of power is not understood to be a problem anarchists, as long as this relationship is based on trust and can be undone at any time. Of course more knowledgeable/active people in a certain set of circumstances may be more central to achieving specific goals.
For example, a group of people renovating a house may choose to trust their carpenter friend to coordinate/lead renovation works because they have more experience in this field. This does not mean blind trust and absolute authority of the carpenter over the others. If the carpenter behaves in irresponsible/unrecommendable manner, people may choose to ignore their advice or even exclude them from the group.
On a larger scale, the same kind of principles apply. A whole branch of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism relies on a society-wide delegation of trust to specific unions. Who better to know how to organize the bakeries around town than the bakers’ union? Likewise for the rails union, the telephone union, the peasants union… This was the organizing principle of the spanish revolution (1936) in which millions of anarchists took part.
the ongoing voluntary consent given by individuals
Precisely. “Consensus” (no opposition) is an established anarchist organizing principle. Consent-based organizing (active, explicit consent) is a more modern and foolproof take on that.
