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Oh no, Anarchists!
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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It kind of illustrates why anarchy is as doomed to fail as libertarianism; note the use of force and the fact that the anarchists friends are not there defending him.
Anarchy cannot defend itself from organized outside threats because it is, by its nature, not organized, particularly in its use of force to confront fascism.
Anarchy is not by nature disorganized. Lack of hierarchy doesn't mean lack of organization. Probably a well-functioning anarchist organization is better organized than most hierarchical ones.
If friends are not there to defend the group of three, mutual aid is missing. That's why it failed.
Actually, there seems to be a bit of a mix-up. Let me clarify.
In an anarchist group, enforcing anything goes against its fundamental principles.
If personal gain is the motive, one isn't truly aligned with the group's social contract and isn't considered part of it.
Decisions are made collectively, without hierarchy. Voting or delegating organisational tasks to sub-groups is the norm.
I won't go into words like "attacking," "defense," or "threats" as they are military terms, far from the anarchist ethos.
And I won't call you "bro" or make you read theory. I feel you won't.
Why defenseless? The entire organization can defense itself from outsiders. No need of hierarchy for that.
Just one gifted sociopath dooms it from the inside…
I long for mutual aid society, but every time I have participated in any form of it, I’ve had to back away as it invariably becomes toxic. I just don’t have the energy to keep fighting, honestly.
Anarchism is really against coercion, that's what is meant by hierarchy. Hierarchy only makes sense if it's used for coercion of other's behavior.
There is no reason a group of people can't organize in a voluntary hierarchy to complete a task without the use of coercion.
Imagine a group of 10 anarchist making pizza for the homeless. Two of them make pizza for a living and 8 are there for the week to help out. There is nothing preventing those 8 people from taking instruction from the two that know how to make pizza. Nobody is coerced to be there or to do anything.
We don't need to incentivse not selling people out. Heirarchy creates a set of incentives TO sell people out. Remove those incentives and people will for the most part not sell people out. You've got it exactly backwards.
Ask your buddy mao about anarchist fighting forces. He literally took anarchist tactics around decentralized militias and used them to great success. The Vietnamese as well. Or have a look at the Spanish revolution, rojava, the Ukrainian black army, or the zapatistas if you need more proof that decentralized militant forces are effective and capable. It doesn't warrant an in detail explanation because "but how fight if democracy???" is weak as fuck.
Spain was not part of WW2. Facists won before that, though.
Zapitista, Makhnovshchina, Rojava, Zomia, etc. didn't all descend into mass crime and slaughter.
What we've seen is these movements benefit the people living there.
Correct... and notably, unlike the other forces around them (Syrian dictatorship, Turkish-sponsored islamists, ISIS, etc) they responded to the accusation within a month:
Are you the one that said not to say "go read theory"? Because the urge to tell you to go read theory is pretty fuckin strong. I'm not going to summarize 200 years of political philosophy and history for you. Especially because I know you're just gonna go "no you're wrong and my heirarchical realism is right" no matter how compelling my points are. I'll give you a couple of places to start, I guess.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. E-book/PDF version. Audiobook version.
Anarchy Works, Peter Gelderloos. PDF/E-book version Audiobook version
Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott, pdf version
An Anarchist FAQ
On YouTube: Anark (Theory essays), Andrewism (Theory and Praxis), Zoe Baker (PhD in anarchist history).
Also, the Spanish revolution is a lot more complicated than "the fascists won btw". Your tone again suggests it's not worth the effort of breaking it down for.you. I don't have any specific recommendations on that other than to open a book. Have a good day and go fuck yourself
They said x and you're somehow reading y.
Yes, and that mutual aid relies on people all voluntarily helping when there is a problem, rather than having people who are tasked with ensuring people are protected, which is the same reason libertarianism fails; it's an ideology that doesn't acknowledge human self-interest and selfishness, instead it assumes everyone will just agree to abide by a communal philosophy. Many people do not, for all kinds of reasons.
If you are going to create laws and codes of conduct and a means to enforce those laws that's just a normal state with extra steps.
You can maybe do anarchy at a small scale and in specific contexts but not at the scale needed to make a society function and do things like protect minorities the larger community doesn't give a shit about.
Who said anarchists and their friends will not defend from outside threats? The Spanish anarchists organized and fought for 3 years against overwhelming odds when they had to.
Yeah , but ...
In Paris we fought and were massacred.
In Korea/Manchuria we fought and were massacred.
In Ukraine we fought and were massacred.
And as you say in Spain we fought, but then we were massacred.
There's more of course, but you get the idea.
Something probably should be done differently in the future.
So? How many slave revolutions did we have before it was "technically" abolished (it's still ongoing, but at least illegal in principle)? We had legal slavery for like ~6K years until it was abolished. Capitalism only exists for ~400 years and there were hundreds of failed democratic revolutions. Anarchism as a movement is barely over 150yo and no anarchist revolution happened before 100 years. Just because things don't happen overnight, or even in our lifetime, doesn't mean they're impossible.
So, yeah, looking at those examples I'd say we should try to prevent our opponets from going fascist.
If there's anything fascists are good at it's murdering lots and lots of people, so Id say we should stop them from gaining a following or try to remove their following if they already got one.
Easier said then done, but, to steal your words, doesn't mean it's impossible.
Remains to be seen if anarchism can ever win though.
Statist forces have always triumphed.
Monarchy always triumphed over democracy until it didn't. Slavery always triumphed over abolition until it didn't.
But none of those triumphs were inevitable.
It's nice to think they were: I'd rather live in a world without slavery and with democracy but there was no guarantee of success except the fact that in hindsight it was successful.
Not all forms of government have won out. Nor will all possible forms of government succeed.
Yes, but looking forward from their end, with your perspective, none of them were possible. My point is that it's fallacious to claim that just because it hasn't succeed yet, it can't succeed.
Nowhere does this preclude future victory: this is an accurate representation of the current state of affairs. Anarchy has 0 victories and it remains to be seen if there will be any.
Until 1783 Democracy had no modern victories either, and it very much remained to be seen if it would.
Make a point. Don't make me assume what your point is and then just restate random facts still without making a point.
My point is and always has been the same: we don't and can't know if Anarchism will win out against statist forces or not. All we know is that it never has.
If you're expecting a more polemic argument about Anarchism Bad or something you won't find it. I wasn't here to debate anarchism: just to add a caveat.
I mean your argument boils down to "we can't see the futurere" to which I can only answer "well duh". There's nothing there.
Also notably, the Kronstadt anarchists held a general assembly to dicsuss the question of "shall we accept Lenin's ultimatum, or fight a battle against the Red Army?" and decided democratically to fight.
(The battle was extremely bloody, anarchists lost and the Red Army won, at the cost of losing at least 5 times more people. Considerable numbers of anarchists escaped to Finland.)
In short: anarchists can use heavy artillery when needed, even if they know that war is not healthy - neither for them or the society they want.
mutual aid, equality or freedom are not doomed to fail: as long as human beings live in societies they will seek cooperation and justice.
Perhaps like... organised cooperation, even perhaps putting things on paper to make sure what has been agreed upon gets followed through. Maybe even assign some people to do that for the larger society, so everyone doest have to worry about it. I mean, everyone should help each other, so if someone just doesn't anyone on purpose and even takes other's things, they should face some sort of negative consequence, but then we'd need to assign people who verify that someone has broken the rules and some to enforce that the negative consequences actually happen.
And wow, the anarcho-syndicalist commune now has government, taxes, justice and law enforcement.
People are by nature cooperative unless fucked over, but I find it weird that the prescriptive meaning of "anarchy" is completely glossed over.
The type of society I want to live in definitely won't happen without any sort of rules or regulations about at least some things. Otherwise we won't have industry, and I like my toys. We can't manage a good (and advanced) society without good regulation which requires good government.
Your toys are being manufactured by some underpaid slave worker in china or india. Have fun playing with these in the few hours of life you got left from the industry.
Do you wait your turn in line at the store under the threat of violence? Do you only drive the speed limit because if you didn't you would get pulled over and have your license suspended? Do you give money/food to the homeless despite it being againstl local bylaws that could land you with a fine?
Enforcement in day to day life is an illusion. People don't need to be forced to "behave". By and large, most of us just do because we want to get on with our day. If there is no social incentive to harm others, for the most part people.wont harm others because we simply have no desire to harm others. There are ways to account for fringe cases that don't require a hierarchical, domineering system
This is a great time to bring up elite panic. TL;DR in emergency situations (fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, bombing, etc.), it's been proven time and again that individuals are not only capable of organizing impromptu mutual aid and direct action networks, but that they're better at disaster relief than state bodies. When heirarchical enforcement rears it's head in the form of state and military bodies, things get awful for everyone quickly. A podcast on the topic. A book on the topic.
This is a time and place where all social paradigms are shattered. You can "steal" all you want and fuck over everyone else if you so please without any threat of punishment from above. People don't do that. They help each other, they directly distribute what they have to those who need it most and work together to ensure everyone's wellbeing.
It's not surprising either. Mutual aid is baked into existence. Humans are capable of both cooperation and competition. Our society is built around competition. And even still you see people doing what they can for one another when they're able to. I feel a lot of social ills are caused by alienation from community and not being able to exercise our cooperative impulses enough.
If there were no authority, people would wait in line. By and large, people want to help and labor. Most of us want to work, especially if we feel it is meaningful. If there were no authority, I think the majority of us would be better off for it
Yes, the practical speed limit varies wildly by location on smaller roads and they just choose the lowest one for the whole section.
Anarchism is not anti self-defense, and that applies at the community level as well. A group of anarchist isn't obliged to let a selfish person harm them. Self-defense is neither authority nor coercion.
You have a very skewed idea of anarchism. I won't deny the existence of anti-organizational and pacifist anarchist groups but they're not a majority. Social anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, communalism, Marxist autonomism, council communism, neozapatismo, and especifism are all libertarian socialist ideologies that espouse the necessity of organization and self defense. I'm sure I'm missing a few too. You're taking a silly comic as serious commentary on the ideological substance of a deep and diverse body of political theory.
Anarchism is neither inherently pacifist nor disorganized, that's your lack of understanding showing.
The circle A anarchism logo means "order without hierarchy".
I never implied it was pacifist, but only that it's ineffective. Without some form of a legal heirarchy where a group is empowered to use force to deal with bad actors those bad actors would run amok because normal people are, by and large, bystanders.
Do you know why we have a professional army that dedicates all their time to training and readiness? Because that's what it takes to not be steamrolled by your fascist neighbor state who wants what you have. You can't have some lackadaisical ad hoc minute men arrangement, there are too many humans and too many competing interests for that to work in the modern world. We aren't jungle tribes, we're not all going to go live in communial farming homesteads or whatever. So where do I live? In a city with housing? Who makes sure my lights stay on and that my landlord didn't use asbestos and lead pipes when building the place? Who has the authority to say water must be safe to drink? If everyone else in my building doesn't believe lead pipes are dangerous am I just shit out of luck if I don't replace the pipes in the facility myself?
You can't just have mob justice or random individuals deciding based on their own arbitrary, subjective opinion how to carry out justice at any given moment. If I see a guy shoplifting and just shoot him, who is in a position to tell me that I was wrong and what gives them the right under a system of anarchy? Does that person's wife or brother now get to shoot me?
I've never once met an anarchist who can coherently explain how, in a practical sense, you ensure justice and order at a large scale without a state, legal framework and a system in which individuals (whether they be democratic representatives, judges, cops, military members etc.) are granted power by the collective to make judgements and decisions based on an agreed upon legally binding code of law. When you press them on any given specific issue they basically just start describing the organs of a state.