Comment on How would an anarchist society work?
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 22 hours ago
The issue is that it’s not one problem, it’s thousands. Anarchism has countless solutions for countless power vacuums, from regulating the flow of meetings to federating different Zapatista towns.
You yourself are probably engaging in anarchic power vacuum mitigation when your friend group decides when to hang out and what to do; if anyone got too much power or responsibility you would take action to make things fair again.
Generally speaking, power vacuums are dismantled by dissolving the hierarchies that can be dissolved, changing the material conditions so power is decentralized, and building a social structure to hold the remaining power conditional on not being authoritarian. You can probably remember doing these things with your friends (or former friends).
Anarchist theory is either descriptive, like critically analysing the Zapatistas, or it’s putative, like sociocracy. So far we have no proven overarching theory of what works for everyone everywhere in every situation, but we do have lots of small anarchist collectives that are benefiting their members and their society in limited scopes.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
This is the best answer. Anarchist societies don’t work in practice. The work in theory.
Klear@quokk.au 21 hours ago
It’s more that they don’t scale well. What works well in a small group of friends will fall apart long before you scale it up even to just a national level, much less all of humanity.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 15 hours ago
The Zapatistas show that region-scale anarchy can work and remain stable. You need more careful and explicit structures to do things at scale, but the same goes for nation-states, just look at the average state’s legal and regulatory codes. Compared to trying not to break the law in a nation-state, participating in local anarchist organizing committees is child’s play.
We’ve only had the opportunity to apply this at a scale larger than the smallest 30-or-so nations, but in theory systems like sociocracy can nest exponentially, meaning there are applications that are already halfway to a world government.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 20 hours ago
I guess we could just choose not to scale? We could go back to the city state model they had in Europe during middle ages and in antiquity.
The only issue is how you would defend yourself militarily. Case in point: there is a reason why these city states eventually became part of the Roman Empire. A city state versus the Roman empire? It’s not a fair fight at all.
To prevent something like this you would need, like, a super NATO full of thousands of nation states, but corporation at that level maybe difficult (NATO is already proving difficult to maintain as is). You could also have a state for the purpose of only having the military, but that could easily slide into a military dictatorship. So it’s tricky.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Jokes aside, the cities model worked because that was the scale a society was able to grow to. Transport was very difficult as was communication. And even in the ancient cities there was a power hierarchy with councils of elders and stuff.
Klear@quokk.au 19 hours ago
If your idea of not scaling up involves a super NATO of thousands of nation states, you should probably go back to the drawing board.
obbeel@lemmy.eco.br 15 hours ago
Military? Who would act militarily against a community? How do you figure slums survive? People could act “militarily” against them. Yet they survive and thrive.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
would anarchy work better in addition to some other system that does not rely on hierarchy?
thatsTheCatch@lemmy.nz 21 hours ago
…that is not what they said at all