Stealing, when it is done by most regular people is out of desperation. Decomodification of things necessary to live, and change in the socioeconomic system from a hierarchical one to a cooperative one would very likely lead to reduction in such crimes.
You are misunderstanding why people become thieves in the first place, and how comparatively uncommon pure thievery is. The majority of theft is legal and is done in the name of capitalist profiteering. Not that break ins don’t happen, nor that everyone will be a good person and accept a society of mutual aid.
Genuine theft will still occur. The consequences of something being stolen would not be the same within an anarchist society built on mutual aid. It is much easier to recover from theft when shelter, food, water, are all guaranteed things that you don’t have to fret over. So the consequences will largely be interpersonal, grudges and disputes between people over less consequential things like valuables of some particular nature.
I am not of the opinion that violence of the community need be used on such a situation either. We aren’t the police for Christ’s sake. We can actually settle disputes in a proactive way that attempts to rectify the situation that precipitated the theft (maybe someone needs mental health help, maybe there are interpersonal issues) without kicking the shit out of anyone.
Violent crimes can be handled however the community sees fit. But things like theft or destroying someone’s clothes should be handled proactively to ensure lasting solutions for everyone involved. Violence is a pretty bad deterrent for this kind of behavior.
The state doesn’t keep you safe from thieves now. The police are a reactionary force that shows up after you’ve been robbed and then do nothing to help you. The most you get is a police report to refer your insurance company to, if your stolen belongings were insured.
A very real risk of punishment by the state if you happen to get caught is what prevents theft. Your argument conveniently left that important part out and presented a straw man argument.
The rest of these comments talk about unenforced theft like white collar crimes and other class war-like theft. Which just reinforces the idea that only state-executed enforcement of law is actually any good at preventing theft.
Do you think the homeless and hungry are the only people who steal?
High end crime happens ALL the time, and it’s not out of necessity, it’s out of the human condition of greed. Theft happens more often by rich individuals than it does by poor.
mob justice did that before states existed or even humans. Now the state protects one class and loots the other. And guess what? thieves fear a mob more than the state. Things change, bad people find loopholes. How laws work needs to keep changing
Your first argument works in a perfect state, which will never exist. Your second paragraph makes no fucking sense.
This is a big question, and the real answer is, “it’s up to the community to decide”. But I know that’s not very satisfying despite being correct, so here’s an example of how it could work.
The first step is to lower crime / anti-social behaviour. If everyone in the community is happy, there’s less need for anti-social behaviour. Sharing food and pooling resources, helping your neighbour out, teaching children the value of working together, etc. Most people obey the rules and want to be good people but are driven to crime through desperate circumstances [citation needed, but it seems to be true in most of my daily face-to-face interactions].
However, there are always some people who do whatever they want regardless of the cost to others, and some people who specifically want to behave badly. It should be explained to these people why what they’re doing is harmful and try to teach some empathy. The next step might be denying resources which aren’t essential to life, so that they don’t benefit from the community that they are harming. Finally, if they keep being anti-social, they can be imprisoned for the good of the community.
As it stands in my society, the police have a monopoly on legitimate violence. If you want someone physically restrained, it’s up to the police to do so. One problem with this is that the police suck balls. In an anarchist society, the solution could be to have a police force that is made up of randomly selected citizens and rotated every few years. No-one gets to keep this position of authority for long, no-one gets to refuse except because of health reasons, and they are held strictly accountable to everyone else.
But honestly, I don’t think the police will be needed often. You’ve probably seen examples of self-governing systems around you. Think of that one shitty neighbour that no-one likes. How often do you look after their plants when they’re on holiday, go shopping for them when they’re ill, lend a hand when they’re doing some building work? The only way they get through life is because they use money to pay people who don’t yet know how shitty they are. In a society without money (because money creates unjust hierarchy), a lot of their options for being shitty and still having a nice life are removed.
I hope you were asking your question seriously because I ended up saying quite a lot! This is something I’m quite passionate about as you can probably tell. The organisation that I volunteer with has a flat structure so it’s also something that I have a lot of experience with in a smaller way
I am being genuine in my arguments. Political discussions are no fun when the disingenuous trolls take over, even if my sarcastic nature leaks out and I come across that way sometimes.
The first step is to lower crime / anti-social behaviour. If everyone in the community is happy, there’s less need for anti-social behaviour. Sharing food and pooling resources
That first step is a doozy. And is basically the step that every political system gets kind of stuck on. The goal is simple enough, but the actual “how” of getting it done, not to mention how to maintain it once you’ve achieved it, is enormously complex.
And the society without money thing I don’t think is actually possible, unless you want to go back to a purely agrarian society. Money, at it’s core is just a placeholder for resources to simplify bartering. The systems we’ve built around it are often fucked and can go, but money itself is just a useful tool.
I don’t believe that every society / political system does seek to cut crime. For example, parts of the USA right now are seeking to criminalise sleeping outside and other forms of homelessness rather than solving the problem. It has been proven (and is also very obvious) that if you give someone housing and a stable income, they stop being homeless. It’s kinda in the name of “home less”. But a lot of powerful people in America are more interested in keeping rich people rich and people who “don’t deserve it” in the gutters - figuratively and literally. In my vision of an Anarchist Utopia Society TM, the main goal would be to keep as many people happy and healthy as possible which would, by definition, involve lowering crime, anti-social behaviour, homelessness, etc.
As for a moneyless society, I think it is possible as part of my Anarchist Utopia Society TM and I don’t want to start another arguement about that because I have limited time and energy for online arguments. We’ll just have to agree to disagree for now :)
I really am curious what you mean by “moneyless” though. Like, is it just doing away with the money systems we’ve built (like banks, stock markets, etc) or is getting rid of the concept altogether and returning to simple bartering?
Gift based economy. I help you because I know that you will help me. If someone doesn’t pull their weight then they won’t get help. Basically everything runs on social currency and who owes who (but it’s not as strict as “I owe Jenny £5.83”, it’s more like "Jenny’s my friend so I’ll help her)
I have been thinking about your question a lot and kept saying I’d wait till I was at my computer and type out something good and thoughtful. But apparently that’s not happening so you’re getting whatever I type next at 1am and hopefully it’s helpful :P
I don’t think I can really give advice because it depends on what you want to do, the size of your organisation, and (most importantly) what you and your friends / colleagues want. What I’ll do instead is talk about the things I like and dislike at my place and hopefully you can pull something useful from it.
One of the great strengths of anarchism is how flexible it is. I mean this in two ways - firstly, it can be applied in many different forms in many different contexts. The main strength though is that you can more easily change how you work day to day. No single person should be irreplaceable. Of course, everyone has their own strengths, skills and knowledge and you should respect and cherish everyone you work alongside. But there’s no one big boss who needs to be there for anything to get done. Everyone is important; no-one is vital. Where I work, it’s easy for me to take a day off and know that the work will still get done.
I volunteer for an environmental nonprofit. I’m one of about 70 volunteers and we have 6 staff members, half of whom are part time. There does tend to be a bit of a hierarchy with staff members being viewed as more important. It’s something we all try to avoid but because they are paid to be there, they have a lot more available time and effort than those of us who have other things going on in our lives. However, I’m very grateful for the staff because they can take care of all the ‘boring but necessary’ work - things like applying for grants, paperwork for new volunteers, taking care of rent and utilities, etc. It’s useful to have people who are contractually obligated to take care of these things so that I can go about the more interesting (to me) jobs. So my first advice would be to make sure you have any strict obligations covered by someone who is invested in your project.
We have meetings once a month where everyone is invited where we tend to discuss the big-picture issues. This could be topics like “what is our vision” or applying for an award or talking about ongoing problems we might be having. We have an agenda and take minutes, and we have a newsletter and several group chats so everyone can be informed. Communication is very important. However, don’t be disappointed if not many people show. We only have about 10% of our people show up any given month. Most people only have an hour or two a week to volunteer and don’t care for flat structure, big picture, whatever. They just want to help out and have other things going on. That’s fine, because the door is always open for those who do want to have a voice.
I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I would say expect a lot of informal chats and decision making to end up being important. A lot of issues can be solved just by talking to your teammates, because everyone has the power to discuss and make changes. This is a good strength of flat structure! However, it can mean that sometimes you have an informal chat while working, it doesn’t stay in your mind, and one person walks away thinking the problem will be solved and the other person has completely forgotten about it. That might just be because we are always feeling overworked though!
Last thing I’ll say just because I feel like this is very long - you have to appreciate everyone’s efforts and meet them where they’re coming from. Everyone is unique and brings something important with them, and it’s important to tell them you appreciate them. If they give an hour a week, they helped and are valid. If they are joining different teams, weighing in, stepping forward, that’s great too. You have to make sure that people have the option to take leadership positions but also have the option to step back.
The place I work has really changed me for the better. It’s a journey I was already on, but my time with these wonderful people has made me more patient, understand, emotionally open, happy, able to share in the success we make together. Finding the right group of people and letting them be free to make their community better is the essence of anarchism to me
Ah I don’t have nearly enough people helping me out (especially with the bureaucratic stuff) haha. It’s a struggle trying to start an org on my own to the point that I think it’s probably not a workable idea unless I have a lot of people who want to help with the bureaucratic stuff.
If you’re anything like me then you are planning the perfect version of your project and won’t be happy unless you can get there straight away. We have a physical storefront, many people to organise, legal obligations as a business, and we work with several other charities and businesses that we need to coordinate with. That’s why I like having some people who I know are there to work on admin tasks.
When we started though, it was just three university students distributing food from the back of a car. Start small, with what you and your people can manage, and you’ll grow and adjust in time. And if it turns out that you can’t make it work, then you still made a difference in the time you were operating and you still had a good time with your friends along the way. There’s a recent post that’s very pertinent that I’ll try to find and link to
For the record, I’ve already started. We’ve been going for a year and a half now in fact , but the process to make this into some sort of entity etc is all on me so I can’t do it all
Ok, but scale that up and try to account for bad actors. Human nature isn’t going to change, and so the are guaranteed to be people working to abuse the system. “The community will enforce” is just handwaving away the problem without actually dealing with it, just as much as bullshit like “the free market will solve x problem” is.
And how is the problem solved currently in your mind?
The difference between what we have today and what we want to see isn’t some magical world where things work perfectly, it’s one where people can make the changes directly without a ruling class deciding for us.
I try to think of systems that are stable and can scale up to cover everyone (this is also a pipe dream, since people aren’t purely rational). The idea of no one in charge, and the community deciding and enforcing everything can work up to a small town level, but a national or global level, it falls apart.
Some things, like major infrastructure for example, are necessary to have, but impossible to fund through voluntary means. No individual or small community has the money to build it on their own, and getting everyone to agree on what exactly should be done for any given project is damn near impossible. There needs to be a central planning authority of some sort, and they need to have the funding to execute these types of projects. Now what scale and format that planning authority has is the heart of every debate on which political system is best.
The community is in charge. It’s democracy without a class of rulers. Its people working together because it brings them mutual benefit instead of a system built on exploiting others for personal gain.
You can have a “central planning authority”, it would just be voluntarily made up of those small town level groups.
I know that’s the goal, but what are the specifics on how it’s implemented? How does it handle the smooth talker who wants to warp the system into something else for his personal gain? By the time you build in mechanics to handle these edge cases (without just handwaving it away with “the community will enforce it”), you converge back towards something similar to one of the various political systems we have today.
Maybe I’m just too pessimistic to get behind the anarchist thing. My day job is industrial automation and people not doing what was expected or what is best is what causes 90% of my headaches. Relying on people to behave rationally and do what’s best just isn’t in my nature anymore.
As long as the apps at the top of the app stores and songs on the top of the charts are the ones that corporations most advertised, and as long as people will listen to conspiracy theories from Q Anon and demand freedom of speech from Twitter, I genuinely do not trust people to have direct access to decision making. Ask middle class Americans think the biggest political issue right now is the tik tok ban
So instead you prefer the decision making to be in the hands of a small group of people all paid for and owned by the corporations, and who pander to the conspiracy nuts?
I genuinely do not trust people to have direct access to decision making
I wonder what you think politicians are, and whose interests they’re acting on (hint: it isn’t yours, and depending on how much “lobbying” money bribes they’ve gotten, it might not even be their own, see those who serve the oil lobby for example)
The people who taught you what “human nature” is, have a vested interest specifically in you thinking that humans are naturally greedy cut throat creatures, because that serves their systems of exploitation and oppression which they need you to continue to participle[ate in not because it’s fact.
Beyond that, your argument is 100% appeal to tradition, and you not being able to imagine existence outside of the social constructs that have been around in some cases for a mere couple of hundred, in other cases for, at most, 4-5 thousand years, doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, only that you’ve been indoctrinated well enough in to believing that is the case.
You’ve completely misunderstood what I mean when I say “human nature isn’t going to change”. I’m not saying that all humans are greedy, or going to abuse the system. The “human nature” I’m talking about is the variability of peoples’ personalities. This guarantees that at some point, no matter how idyllic the society you’ve created is, someone is going to come along to break it. And they may not even be acting out of malice. It might simply be that they think they can do it even better. Any system you set up needs to have mechanisms to deal with that.
No, they definitely do. It’s just a wider cast net of more people so the error margin is lower. Think of getting 1 vs 10 vs 1000 people to guess how many jellybeans in a jar.
So you’re saying for nearly 200,000 years people sat around feeling zero sense of responsibility for their group and never acted?
How much of the bystander effect is in part because we are disenfranchised from managing ourselves and our communities? “Oh that’s not my job, I’ll sit here being useless because the cops/&tc will come along and manage it for me”.
For 200,000 years, the world was an extremely violent place, where slavery, genocide, etc were the norm. The idea is usually to try to move away from that.
Scale those thoughts to the human populations at the time. To give an extreme example, if Genghis Khan caused the same scale of death today, that would be 800,000,000 dead.
The world today is far better than it was, but nobody said it is was anywhere near perfect.
Just lol. Is that why there’s billionaires hoarding all the wealth while billions starve? Is that why Palestine is being genocided? Is that why we’re headed full-steam for a climate apocalypse?
There’s no “democracy” nor “checks and balances”. There’s only a sad farce.
Yes, because the democratic nations have democratically decided, that we want to consume more than is wise, that we want to retaliate for Oct 7 and that private property is cool, even if a few have more.
I agree, that mob-rule would remove billionaires, but how would it stop climate change, if there are no regulations against emissions?
Palestinians idk. In nationless anarchy it would not be a structured military, but let’s not pretend there wouldn’t be massive amounts of bloodshed.
None of that is “democratically elected”. Those elections are a farce and I would go as far as to argue that no democracy which decides to kill 30.000 children and perform genocide is legitimate.
And nobody is talking about “mob rule”. We’re talking about anarchism.
Half elected officials with power are appointed not elected. The Supreme Court took away women’s bodily autonomy. There was no popular vote for any of them not a single one. Also just because I vote someone in doesn’t mean I agree with everything they do. Wouldn’t it be more expedient to just use direct democracy so I can actually have a say?
“Your options are conservative A or B, and whatever actions they take are necessarily ones you voted for and agree with!”
But if enough people want something, it’ll happen. It’s just that 50% of the US hates the other 50% and vice versa.
Abortion has long been a contentious issue and will probably be a big part of the election. Republicans are currently shooting themselves in the foot with that.
Yes, because the democratic nations have democratically decided, that we want to consume more than is wise, that we want to retaliate for Oct 7 and that private property is cool, even if a few have more.
Which party is against this? I live in a blue state in America and will gladly vote for them.
Homophobia comes mainly from the will to govern over other people, by shaming their natural and harmless sexual behavior, and is often dictated by some religion. As power structures like to cooperate, be they corporations, states, or churches; sometimes they like to push each others.
Before you ask: yes, some corporations are doing pride shit to appeal to a wider audience and legitimize their power in the modern world. But others like Xitter are helping state and church powers, as they have a common interest in keeping and expanding their own power.
If you also ask: many churches flourish when the state defunds social safety networks, as they can step in to replace them with church-based charities. I work in a state-owned retirement home, and I can first-hand experience it. Secularism is very compromised as churches had to step in to donate stuff, but that was never a charity, as they demanded the secular state of the institution to slowly eroding, because “religion provides comfort to the soul”, and thus mental health care gets the axe first.
Authoritarians in general are excel in giving simple answers to complicated questions. Science? No, god did it. Our economical system is inherently flawed? No, a cabal of evil Jews that don’t want to go back to the holy land did it. An anti-authoritarian project failed due to complicated reasons? No, they simply weren’t authoritarian, and didn’t have a good tyrant to stop the bad tyrants.
Which would you rather? One king/governed/whoever that says being gay is bad, or a majority of the population that says being gay is bad?
At least in the second example, you have >50% of the population being happy. And more likely >80% would be happy otherwise you’d just have the 49% fight back and make life miserable for everyone.
Exactly. We have ~50% saying that now, whoch is why I think an anarchist society on a large scale isn’t feasible to transition to anytime within the next few decades at least.
Some people are born evil. More than most of us would care to think too hard about.
“The greatest crimes are not those committed for the sake of necessity but those committed for the sake of superfluity. One does not become a tyrant to avoid exposure to the cold.” – Aristotle
Was he wrong about the magnitude of crimes committed for the sake of excess being greater than crimes committed for survival? Who steals more - the capitalist class, or the Jean ValJeans of the world?
Does the billionaire that steals the excess production of the working class do so out of necessity?
Does the cop who steals cash from motorists and lies about smelling drugs do so because that cop is underprivileged and disenfranchised by the system?
Not all humans have working moral compasses. Its an unpleasant reality that can be hard for some people to come to grips with and integrate into their worldview, but failure to understand a problem is unlikely to lead to effective solutions.
You’re really not wrong, and I’m not entirely sure why you’re being downvoted. Thievery is largely a product of unfulfilled needs or unchecked hoarding of wealth, one could even argue that the latter is just a reaction to living through or fear of the former. An anarchist society solves both of those problems inherently. How do you steal what can be gotten as a matter of course? I feel like the smallest outlier doing such things in a community would just be a mild inconvenience and caught pretty quickly.
If that’s how it works, then a stable anarchist society is impossible. The first asshole that comes along with a bigger gun than everyone else will have it right back to a dictatorship.
Their “blood thirst” of not wanting thieves and murderers in their society? You realize that our current society is orders more “blood thirsty” than what we describe but only that you hide the violence through the police and the brutal wars and genocides against other nations?
You’re at the magical thinking “And then of course we will all…” crutch that a lot of philosophies lean on
Capitalism: We’ll deregulate and open the market to everyone, and then there will be “perfect competition” in a “free market”
Communism: We have state socialism until society is prepared, and then transition to communism
Anarchism: We won’t have a central authority to prevent aggression, obviously we will work together as mutual interest aligns. And 100% no roving bands of raiders or warlords will ever ruin our society!
I have fringe anarcho-syndicalist politics, I understand the theory. I also understand that nothing exists in a vacuum, and while our happy anarchy-commune/whatever of 3,000 aligned people may build mutual aid tranquillity in our area, others may not. And those others may choose banditry, and your stuff instead of working for food.
So our commune/syndicate/etc form a defensive structure/organization to stop/prevent them - you just created a military/police class of “most equals”. Who will need a command structure for doing the ‘gun/bat meet aggressor’ functions, and some kind of special remit from the community.
Or we say no dedicated force and the classes it brings, and use the irregulars/militia model instead. Which has so many issues on so many different aspects that’s it’s not worth me typing out.
That’s true for all types of society. But it also means that a completely anarchist society is more stable than the rest because the means of self defence are equally distributed and that everyone would rise against such authoritarian attack.
That has never been, and will never be true. You could magically eliminate all weapons on the planet simultaneously and it still won’t be true, since some people are bigger and stronger than others.
And in case you haven’t been paying attention to history; authoritarians very rarely just show up out of nowhere and take over. They are usually installed as leader after some form of revolution, then the title just gets transferred once the authoritarian system is in place. It’s usually far more insidious than just some guy the village has to band together to fight off.
It doesn’t mean that every person has equal ability to physically defend themselves, but that society has the mechanisms to defend everyone that is being attacked.
A grandma doesn’t need to be able to self defend against a thug in the street if the people nearby do it for her.
The second paragraph is not relevant as there are no historical examples of a dictator getting into power from within an anarchist society.
This, but much more importantly - when everyone’s needs are met, and there is no hierarchy to try and get to the top of at the expense of others, people will have no reason to do shit like steal in the first place.
And what about the long road it takes to get to everyone’s needs being met? How will you ever get to that point? It doesn’t just happen overnight.
That may be no reason to do shit like that once everyone’s needs are being met, but there will be until you get to that point, and because of that, there’s no reason to think you would.
Thats why were actually in a “anarchy always has been” meme.
We are free to ignore the law and to object any direct order.
We are free to join a police force and protect the state, to join a police force and kill a civilian, free to take a firearm and kill a police officer, free to be killed by a police officer
We are free to organize institutions and support those.
You are free to join a line of thinking which brings you to a state of servitude.
You are free to comply, others are free to hurt you based on but also regardless of what you do.
Anarchy always has been, always will be.
Sooner we realize how inevitable it is the quicker we can overcome the hurdle and to accept that: Only by also helping others can we truly better ourselves.
A thief is safer under a state because the state can punish those who defend themselves. The point of the state is to be the only ones able to dispense justice.
If someone stole from me, me or my community can dispense justice without fear of the state. Communities tend to not fuck with each other too much lest they start battles, which nobody wants. Humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without states.
There’s just as much or more evidence for groups living mostly peacefully also.
There is no perfect world where nobody dies. We are just way more efficient at at now and at keeping the mess in places where there are mostly non-wealthy people. Is that an improvement?
I don’t see how anyone would be safe from thieves in anarchy.
You are misunderstanding why people become thieves in the first place, and how comparatively uncommon pure thievery is. The majority of theft is legal and is done in the name of capitalist profiteering. Not that break ins don’t happen, nor that everyone will be a good person and accept a society of mutual aid.
Genuine theft will still occur. The consequences of something being stolen would not be the same within an anarchist society built on mutual aid. It is much easier to recover from theft when shelter, food, water, are all guaranteed things that you don’t have to fret over. So the consequences will largely be interpersonal, grudges and disputes between people over less consequential things like valuables of some particular nature.
I am not of the opinion that violence of the community need be used on such a situation either. We aren’t the police for Christ’s sake. We can actually settle disputes in a proactive way that attempts to rectify the situation that precipitated the theft (maybe someone needs mental health help, maybe there are interpersonal issues) without kicking the shit out of anyone.
Violent crimes can be handled however the community sees fit. But things like theft or destroying someone’s clothes should be handled proactively to ensure lasting solutions for everyone involved. Violence is a pretty bad deterrent for this kind of behavior.
The state doesn’t keep you safe from thieves now. The police are a reactionary force that shows up after you’ve been robbed and then do nothing to help you. The most you get is a police report to refer your insurance company to, if your stolen belongings were insured.
A very real risk of punishment by the state if you happen to get caught is what prevents theft. Your argument conveniently left that important part out and presented a straw man argument.
The rest of these comments talk about unenforced theft like white collar crimes and other class war-like theft. Which just reinforces the idea that only state-executed enforcement of law is actually any good at preventing theft.
Not needing to steal is what keeps most people from stealing, not fear of punishment.
Do you think the homeless and hungry are the only people who steal?
High end crime happens ALL the time, and it’s not out of necessity, it’s out of the human condition of greed. Theft happens more often by rich individuals than it does by poor.
It’s a good thing the state takes that “high end” crime as seriously as smoking weed.
mob justice did that before states existed or even humans. Now the state protects one class and loots the other. And guess what? thieves fear a mob more than the state. Things change, bad people find loopholes. How laws work needs to keep changing
Your first argument works in a perfect state, which will never exist. Your second paragraph makes no fucking sense.
No rulers doesn’t mean no rules
Who has authority to enforce those rules? If no one, then how do you resolve disputes in a civil, yet binding fashion?
This is a big question, and the real answer is, “it’s up to the community to decide”. But I know that’s not very satisfying despite being correct, so here’s an example of how it could work.
The first step is to lower crime / anti-social behaviour. If everyone in the community is happy, there’s less need for anti-social behaviour. Sharing food and pooling resources, helping your neighbour out, teaching children the value of working together, etc. Most people obey the rules and want to be good people but are driven to crime through desperate circumstances [citation needed, but it seems to be true in most of my daily face-to-face interactions].
However, there are always some people who do whatever they want regardless of the cost to others, and some people who specifically want to behave badly. It should be explained to these people why what they’re doing is harmful and try to teach some empathy. The next step might be denying resources which aren’t essential to life, so that they don’t benefit from the community that they are harming. Finally, if they keep being anti-social, they can be imprisoned for the good of the community.
As it stands in my society, the police have a monopoly on legitimate violence. If you want someone physically restrained, it’s up to the police to do so. One problem with this is that the police suck balls. In an anarchist society, the solution could be to have a police force that is made up of randomly selected citizens and rotated every few years. No-one gets to keep this position of authority for long, no-one gets to refuse except because of health reasons, and they are held strictly accountable to everyone else.
But honestly, I don’t think the police will be needed often. You’ve probably seen examples of self-governing systems around you. Think of that one shitty neighbour that no-one likes. How often do you look after their plants when they’re on holiday, go shopping for them when they’re ill, lend a hand when they’re doing some building work? The only way they get through life is because they use money to pay people who don’t yet know how shitty they are. In a society without money (because money creates unjust hierarchy), a lot of their options for being shitty and still having a nice life are removed.
I hope you were asking your question seriously because I ended up saying quite a lot! This is something I’m quite passionate about as you can probably tell. The organisation that I volunteer with has a flat structure so it’s also something that I have a lot of experience with in a smaller way
I am being genuine in my arguments. Political discussions are no fun when the disingenuous trolls take over, even if my sarcastic nature leaks out and I come across that way sometimes.
That first step is a doozy. And is basically the step that every political system gets kind of stuck on. The goal is simple enough, but the actual “how” of getting it done, not to mention how to maintain it once you’ve achieved it, is enormously complex.
And the society without money thing I don’t think is actually possible, unless you want to go back to a purely agrarian society. Money, at it’s core is just a placeholder for resources to simplify bartering. The systems we’ve built around it are often fucked and can go, but money itself is just a useful tool.
I don’t believe that every society / political system does seek to cut crime. For example, parts of the USA right now are seeking to criminalise sleeping outside and other forms of homelessness rather than solving the problem. It has been proven (and is also very obvious) that if you give someone housing and a stable income, they stop being homeless. It’s kinda in the name of “home less”. But a lot of powerful people in America are more interested in keeping rich people rich and people who “don’t deserve it” in the gutters - figuratively and literally. In my vision of an Anarchist Utopia Society TM, the main goal would be to keep as many people happy and healthy as possible which would, by definition, involve lowering crime, anti-social behaviour, homelessness, etc.
A good example would be the UK which offers speed awareness courses to drivers who are caught breaking the speed limit. This is sometimes cheaper for the offender and avoids getting points on your driving license (too many points means a driving ban). Drivers who took this speed awareness course are less likely to reoffend than people who chose not to take it.
As for a moneyless society, I think it is possible as part of my Anarchist Utopia Society TM and I don’t want to start another arguement about that because I have limited time and energy for online arguments. We’ll just have to agree to disagree for now :)
I really am curious what you mean by “moneyless” though. Like, is it just doing away with the money systems we’ve built (like banks, stock markets, etc) or is getting rid of the concept altogether and returning to simple bartering?
Gift based economy. I help you because I know that you will help me. If someone doesn’t pull their weight then they won’t get help. Basically everything runs on social currency and who owes who (but it’s not as strict as “I owe Jenny £5.83”, it’s more like "Jenny’s my friend so I’ll help her)
How does that scale up to large communities where people aren’t generally going to know each other on that level?
Bartering is a feature of money systems, not their origin. Andrewism summarizing David Graeber YT.
I’m trying to set up an org like that myself currently. Any good advice?
I have been thinking about your question a lot and kept saying I’d wait till I was at my computer and type out something good and thoughtful. But apparently that’s not happening so you’re getting whatever I type next at 1am and hopefully it’s helpful :P
I don’t think I can really give advice because it depends on what you want to do, the size of your organisation, and (most importantly) what you and your friends / colleagues want. What I’ll do instead is talk about the things I like and dislike at my place and hopefully you can pull something useful from it.
One of the great strengths of anarchism is how flexible it is. I mean this in two ways - firstly, it can be applied in many different forms in many different contexts. The main strength though is that you can more easily change how you work day to day. No single person should be irreplaceable. Of course, everyone has their own strengths, skills and knowledge and you should respect and cherish everyone you work alongside. But there’s no one big boss who needs to be there for anything to get done. Everyone is important; no-one is vital. Where I work, it’s easy for me to take a day off and know that the work will still get done.
I volunteer for an environmental nonprofit. I’m one of about 70 volunteers and we have 6 staff members, half of whom are part time. There does tend to be a bit of a hierarchy with staff members being viewed as more important. It’s something we all try to avoid but because they are paid to be there, they have a lot more available time and effort than those of us who have other things going on in our lives. However, I’m very grateful for the staff because they can take care of all the ‘boring but necessary’ work - things like applying for grants, paperwork for new volunteers, taking care of rent and utilities, etc. It’s useful to have people who are contractually obligated to take care of these things so that I can go about the more interesting (to me) jobs. So my first advice would be to make sure you have any strict obligations covered by someone who is invested in your project.
We have meetings once a month where everyone is invited where we tend to discuss the big-picture issues. This could be topics like “what is our vision” or applying for an award or talking about ongoing problems we might be having. We have an agenda and take minutes, and we have a newsletter and several group chats so everyone can be informed. Communication is very important. However, don’t be disappointed if not many people show. We only have about 10% of our people show up any given month. Most people only have an hour or two a week to volunteer and don’t care for flat structure, big picture, whatever. They just want to help out and have other things going on. That’s fine, because the door is always open for those who do want to have a voice.
I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I would say expect a lot of informal chats and decision making to end up being important. A lot of issues can be solved just by talking to your teammates, because everyone has the power to discuss and make changes. This is a good strength of flat structure! However, it can mean that sometimes you have an informal chat while working, it doesn’t stay in your mind, and one person walks away thinking the problem will be solved and the other person has completely forgotten about it. That might just be because we are always feeling overworked though!
Last thing I’ll say just because I feel like this is very long - you have to appreciate everyone’s efforts and meet them where they’re coming from. Everyone is unique and brings something important with them, and it’s important to tell them you appreciate them. If they give an hour a week, they helped and are valid. If they are joining different teams, weighing in, stepping forward, that’s great too. You have to make sure that people have the option to take leadership positions but also have the option to step back.
The place I work has really changed me for the better. It’s a journey I was already on, but my time with these wonderful people has made me more patient, understand, emotionally open, happy, able to share in the success we make together. Finding the right group of people and letting them be free to make their community better is the essence of anarchism to me
Ah I don’t have nearly enough people helping me out (especially with the bureaucratic stuff) haha. It’s a struggle trying to start an org on my own to the point that I think it’s probably not a workable idea unless I have a lot of people who want to help with the bureaucratic stuff.
If you’re anything like me then you are planning the perfect version of your project and won’t be happy unless you can get there straight away. We have a physical storefront, many people to organise, legal obligations as a business, and we work with several other charities and businesses that we need to coordinate with. That’s why I like having some people who I know are there to work on admin tasks.
When we started though, it was just three university students distributing food from the back of a car. Start small, with what you and your people can manage, and you’ll grow and adjust in time. And if it turns out that you can’t make it work, then you still made a difference in the time you were operating and you still had a good time with your friends along the way. There’s a recent post that’s very pertinent that I’ll try to find and link to
EDIT: https://chaos.social/@saxnot/112349120606446433
For the record, I’ve already started. We’ve been going for a year and a half now in fact , but the process to make this into some sort of entity etc is all on me so I can’t do it all
The community enforces rules?
Ok, but scale that up and try to account for bad actors. Human nature isn’t going to change, and so the are guaranteed to be people working to abuse the system. “The community will enforce” is just handwaving away the problem without actually dealing with it, just as much as bullshit like “the free market will solve x problem” is.
And how is the problem solved currently in your mind?
The difference between what we have today and what we want to see isn’t some magical world where things work perfectly, it’s one where people can make the changes directly without a ruling class deciding for us.
I try to think of systems that are stable and can scale up to cover everyone (this is also a pipe dream, since people aren’t purely rational). The idea of no one in charge, and the community deciding and enforcing everything can work up to a small town level, but a national or global level, it falls apart.
Some things, like major infrastructure for example, are necessary to have, but impossible to fund through voluntary means. No individual or small community has the money to build it on their own, and getting everyone to agree on what exactly should be done for any given project is damn near impossible. There needs to be a central planning authority of some sort, and they need to have the funding to execute these types of projects. Now what scale and format that planning authority has is the heart of every debate on which political system is best.
The community is in charge. It’s democracy without a class of rulers. Its people working together because it brings them mutual benefit instead of a system built on exploiting others for personal gain.
You can have a “central planning authority”, it would just be voluntarily made up of those small town level groups.
I know that’s the goal, but what are the specifics on how it’s implemented? How does it handle the smooth talker who wants to warp the system into something else for his personal gain? By the time you build in mechanics to handle these edge cases (without just handwaving it away with “the community will enforce it”), you converge back towards something similar to one of the various political systems we have today.
Maybe I’m just too pessimistic to get behind the anarchist thing. My day job is industrial automation and people not doing what was expected or what is best is what causes 90% of my headaches. Relying on people to behave rationally and do what’s best just isn’t in my nature anymore.
Isn’t that what we have right now
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but you could have central planning, but they wouldn’t have any authority…
As long as the apps at the top of the app stores and songs on the top of the charts are the ones that corporations most advertised, and as long as people will listen to conspiracy theories from Q Anon and demand freedom of speech from Twitter, I genuinely do not trust people to have direct access to decision making. Ask middle class Americans think the biggest political issue right now is the tik tok ban
So instead you prefer the decision making to be in the hands of a small group of people all paid for and owned by the corporations, and who pander to the conspiracy nuts?
I wonder what you think politicians are, and whose interests they’re acting on (hint: it isn’t yours, and depending on how much
“lobbying” moneybribes they’ve gotten, it might not even be their own, see those who serve the oil lobby for example)The people who taught you what “human nature” is, have a vested interest specifically in you thinking that humans are naturally greedy cut throat creatures, because that serves their systems of exploitation and oppression which they need you to continue to participle[ate in not because it’s fact.
Beyond that, your argument is 100% appeal to tradition, and you not being able to imagine existence outside of the social constructs that have been around in some cases for a mere couple of hundred, in other cases for, at most, 4-5 thousand years, doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, only that you’ve been indoctrinated well enough in to believing that is the case.
You’ve completely misunderstood what I mean when I say “human nature isn’t going to change”. I’m not saying that all humans are greedy, or going to abuse the system. The “human nature” I’m talking about is the variability of peoples’ personalities. This guarantees that at some point, no matter how idyllic the society you’ve created is, someone is going to come along to break it. And they may not even be acting out of malice. It might simply be that they think they can do it even better. Any system you set up needs to have mechanisms to deal with that.
Oh no, I never considered human nature! My whole worldview is ruined!
What’s to stop the community from getting it horrendously wrong, as human communities have done so many times in the past?
What stops it currently?
Laws (at least somewhat) and the state’s monopoly on violence
Oh states don’t get anything horrendously wrong?
Huh, didn’t know that.
No, they definitely do. It’s just a wider cast net of more people so the error margin is lower. Think of getting 1 vs 10 vs 1000 people to guess how many jellybeans in a jar.
“The community” usually doesn’t. The most likely result is the bystander effect.
So you’re saying for nearly 200,000 years people sat around feeling zero sense of responsibility for their group and never acted?
How much of the bystander effect is in part because we are disenfranchised from managing ourselves and our communities? “Oh that’s not my job, I’ll sit here being useless because the cops/&tc will come along and manage it for me”.
For 200,000 years, the world was an extremely violent place, where slavery, genocide, etc were the norm. The idea is usually to try to move away from that.
Of course, there are not more people in slavery today than at any other time in the past, nor does genocide go on especially not in industrial scales.
Scale those thoughts to the human populations at the time. To give an extreme example, if Genghis Khan caused the same scale of death today, that would be 800,000,000 dead.
The world today is far better than it was, but nobody said it is was anywhere near perfect.
Uhhh… yes, for any community large enough that they didn’t know everyone in it.
Which has been debunked, as is mentioned further down the link you yourself posted
https://www.anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci58
So basically mob-justice.
Because witch hunts have never gone wrong and were always justified.
“This man loves other men, that’s weird, let’s kill him.” - apparently no one ever
Also relevant meme:
“justice is not handed down from above and is therefore unfair” < words of the utterly deranged
You mean the process, that is democratically decided by elections with a bunch of checks and balances in the process?
Just lol. Is that why there’s billionaires hoarding all the wealth while billions starve? Is that why Palestine is being genocided? Is that why we’re headed full-steam for a climate apocalypse?
There’s no “democracy” nor “checks and balances”. There’s only a sad farce.
Yes, because the democratic nations have democratically decided, that we want to consume more than is wise, that we want to retaliate for Oct 7 and that private property is cool, even if a few have more.
I agree, that mob-rule would remove billionaires, but how would it stop climate change, if there are no regulations against emissions?
Palestinians idk. In nationless anarchy it would not be a structured military, but let’s not pretend there wouldn’t be massive amounts of bloodshed.
None of that is “democratically elected”. Those elections are a farce and I would go as far as to argue that no democracy which decides to kill 30.000 children and perform genocide is legitimate.
And nobody is talking about “mob rule”. We’re talking about anarchism.
Idk, what to tell you m8, but your idea of what’s happening in the middle east seems way off.
source
The majority of Israelis want the war.
Half elected officials with power are appointed not elected. The Supreme Court took away women’s bodily autonomy. There was no popular vote for any of them not a single one. Also just because I vote someone in doesn’t mean I agree with everything they do. Wouldn’t it be more expedient to just use direct democracy so I can actually have a say?
“Your options are conservative A or B, and whatever actions they take are necessarily ones you voted for and agree with!”
OK, that’s some US issues.
But if enough people want something, it’ll happen. It’s just that 50% of the US hates the other 50% and vice versa.
Abortion has long been a contentious issue and will probably be a big part of the election. Republicans are currently shooting themselves in the foot with that.
Which party is against this? I live in a blue state in America and will gladly vote for them.
Homophobia comes mainly from the will to govern over other people, by shaming their natural and harmless sexual behavior, and is often dictated by some religion. As power structures like to cooperate, be they corporations, states, or churches; sometimes they like to push each others.
Before you ask: yes, some corporations are doing pride shit to appeal to a wider audience and legitimize their power in the modern world. But others like Xitter are helping state and church powers, as they have a common interest in keeping and expanding their own power.
If you also ask: many churches flourish when the state defunds social safety networks, as they can step in to replace them with church-based charities. I work in a state-owned retirement home, and I can first-hand experience it. Secularism is very compromised as churches had to step in to donate stuff, but that was never a charity, as they demanded the secular state of the institution to slowly eroding, because “religion provides comfort to the soul”, and thus mental health care gets the axe first.
Authoritarians in general are excel in giving simple answers to complicated questions. Science? No, god did it. Our economical system is inherently flawed? No, a cabal of evil Jews that don’t want to go back to the holy land did it. An anti-authoritarian project failed due to complicated reasons? No, they simply weren’t authoritarian, and didn’t have a good tyrant to stop the bad tyrants.
Which would you rather? One king/governed/whoever that says being gay is bad, or a majority of the population that says being gay is bad?
At least in the second example, you have >50% of the population being happy. And more likely >80% would be happy otherwise you’d just have the 49% fight back and make life miserable for everyone.
If you had 50% saying stuff like that, you wouldn’t even have an anarchist society anyway.
Exactly. We have ~50% saying that now, whoch is why I think an anarchist society on a large scale isn’t feasible to transition to anytime within the next few decades at least.
There’s years in which nothing happens, and then there’s weeks in which years happen. Don’t underestimate how quickly radicalization can happen.
Historically, most revolutions have been a new upper class replacing an old one.
Yeah well we’re not trying to do that, so 🤷♂️
Theivery is a result of material needs unfulfilled, not some random genetic drive to go stealing.
Some people are born evil. More than most of us would care to think too hard about.
“The greatest crimes are not those committed for the sake of necessity but those committed for the sake of superfluity. One does not become a tyrant to avoid exposure to the cold.” – Aristotle
“Slavery is both expedient and right” - Aristotle
Probably a bad idea to quote Aristotle as a moral authority on anything but the rules of rhetoric.
Clearly he was wrong sometimes.
Was he wrong about the magnitude of crimes committed for the sake of excess being greater than crimes committed for survival? Who steals more - the capitalist class, or the Jean ValJeans of the world?
Said the guy arguing that some people are “born evil” and pretending they can’t follow the logical chain from that assumption.
How do you believe anyone is “born evil”? What does that mean? Would you support eugenics if this ‘evil gene’ could be identified?
What an idealistic, immaterial look at the world. No, people are not born evil with an addiction to stealing, lol.
Does the billionaire that steals the excess production of the working class do so out of necessity?
Does the cop who steals cash from motorists and lies about smelling drugs do so because that cop is underprivileged and disenfranchised by the system?
Not all humans have working moral compasses. Its an unpleasant reality that can be hard for some people to come to grips with and integrate into their worldview, but failure to understand a problem is unlikely to lead to effective solutions.
People are products of their environment and their material conditions, exactly. You aren’t genetically a billionaire or a cop, lmao.
What empty, vague idealism.
You’re really not wrong, and I’m not entirely sure why you’re being downvoted. Thievery is largely a product of unfulfilled needs or unchecked hoarding of wealth, one could even argue that the latter is just a reaction to living through or fear of the former. An anarchist society solves both of those problems inherently. How do you steal what can be gotten as a matter of course? I feel like the smallest outlier doing such things in a community would just be a mild inconvenience and caught pretty quickly.
Because shitlibs are on Lemmy now.
You are free to steal. And the rest of the community is free to beat the shit out of you.
If that’s how it works, then a stable anarchist society is impossible. The first asshole that comes along with a bigger gun than everyone else will have it right back to a dictatorship.
The community will band against the dictator as much as the thief
They most likely follow the dictator, at the very least to sate their blood thirst.
Their “blood thirst” of not wanting thieves and murderers in their society? You realize that our current society is orders more “blood thirsty” than what we describe but only that you hide the violence through the police and the brutal wars and genocides against other nations?
You’re making their point for them
And you’d rather have mobs kill criminals themselves? Enact the death penalty for petty thieves while they celebrate billionaires like they do today?
No?
Curious, because that’s the most likely scenario.
wtf are you on about?
You’re at the magical thinking “And then of course we will all…” crutch that a lot of philosophies lean on
Capitalism: We’ll deregulate and open the market to everyone, and then there will be “perfect competition” in a “free market”
Communism: We have state socialism until society is prepared, and then transition to communism
Anarchism: We won’t have a central authority to prevent aggression, obviously we will work together as mutual interest aligns. And 100% no roving bands of raiders or warlords will ever ruin our society!
Yes, by definition that’s how anarchism works. If if wasn’t like this, it wouldn’t be anarchism. Not sure why this is a difficult concept to handle.
Nobody said that external dangers are not a potential issue, but the plan is to oppose them. Not a difficult concept to grasp either.
I have fringe anarcho-syndicalist politics, I understand the theory. I also understand that nothing exists in a vacuum, and while our happy anarchy-commune/whatever of 3,000 aligned people may build mutual aid tranquillity in our area, others may not. And those others may choose banditry, and your stuff instead of working for food.
So our commune/syndicate/etc form a defensive structure/organization to stop/prevent them - you just created a military/police class of “most equals”. Who will need a command structure for doing the ‘gun/bat meet aggressor’ functions, and some kind of special remit from the community. Or we say no dedicated force and the classes it brings, and use the irregulars/militia model instead. Which has so many issues on so many different aspects that’s it’s not worth me typing out.
Ffs go read Hobbes’ Leviathan
That’s true for all types of society. But it also means that a completely anarchist society is more stable than the rest because the means of self defence are equally distributed and that everyone would rise against such authoritarian attack.
That has never been, and will never be true. You could magically eliminate all weapons on the planet simultaneously and it still won’t be true, since some people are bigger and stronger than others.
And in case you haven’t been paying attention to history; authoritarians very rarely just show up out of nowhere and take over. They are usually installed as leader after some form of revolution, then the title just gets transferred once the authoritarian system is in place. It’s usually far more insidious than just some guy the village has to band together to fight off.
It doesn’t mean that every person has equal ability to physically defend themselves, but that society has the mechanisms to defend everyone that is being attacked. A grandma doesn’t need to be able to self defend against a thug in the street if the people nearby do it for her.
The second paragraph is not relevant as there are no historical examples of a dictator getting into power from within an anarchist society.
Are there any historical examples of a large-scale anarchist society in the first place?
This, but much more importantly - when everyone’s needs are met, and there is no hierarchy to try and get to the top of at the expense of others, people will have no reason to do shit like steal in the first place.
And what about the long road it takes to get to everyone’s needs being met? How will you ever get to that point? It doesn’t just happen overnight.
That may be no reason to do shit like that once everyone’s needs are being met, but there will be until you get to that point, and because of that, there’s no reason to think you would.
You do realise ambition and greed are two sides of the same coin. Yes, resource scarcity effects this, but there will ALWAYS be people who want more
Thats why were actually in a “anarchy always has been” meme.
We are free to ignore the law and to object any direct order.
We are free to join a police force and protect the state, to join a police force and kill a civilian, free to take a firearm and kill a police officer, free to be killed by a police officer
We are free to organize institutions and support those.
You are free to join a line of thinking which brings you to a state of servitude.
You are free to comply, others are free to hurt you based on but also regardless of what you do.
Anarchy always has been, always will be.
Sooner we realize how inevitable it is the quicker we can overcome the hurdle and to accept that: Only by also helping others can we truly better ourselves.
A thief is safer under a state because the state can punish those who defend themselves. The point of the state is to be the only ones able to dispense justice.
If someone stole from me, me or my community can dispense justice without fear of the state. Communities tend to not fuck with each other too much lest they start battles, which nobody wants. Humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years without states.
The age of tribes was fucking brutal. They attacked and extinguished each other regularly.
There’s just as much or more evidence for groups living mostly peacefully also.
There is no perfect world where nobody dies. We are just way more efficient at at now and at keeping the mess in places where there are mostly non-wealthy people. Is that an improvement?
Ah, so fair process only lynch mops? Great.
Anarchism is the result of controlled opposition brainworms that the bourgeoisie spread to prevent socialism from taking hold
Because everybody knows, anarchism is complete dog shit
Also, modern age anarchists suspiciously rant more about “red fash” than they ever stand up to actual fascism
Fuck them lol
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