Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoThere is none. That’s why I am an anarchist. I guess, I worded that in a bad way.
Comment on Just give me someone to vote for who is normal
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoThere is none. That’s why I am an anarchist. I guess, I worded that in a bad way.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Okay, how exactly do you think things like crime, inequality, or general societal order should be handled?
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s a hard one. And I will admit, that I don’t know everything. I generally think of anarchism not as a perfectly thought out system, that I could implement tomorrow, but as a utopian vision, we should strive towards. But I will give my best shot at answering this.
I’ll start with the easiest one: inequality. My vision of anarchism is very inspired by the ideas of Marx, so I believe that all economic activity should be full owned and controlled by workers in some kind of democratic system. My idea would be to organize the economy via “workers councils” where decisions are reached through mutual negotiations ideally with concencus based decision making. In these councils, every worker, that would be affected by the decisions could participate and have equal power. Of course there would ideally be mechanisms to encourage all to partipate in these decision making processes etc.
There would of course be no one at the top, that makes much more than other people so I don’t really see a way, where inequality would meaningfully arise.
The general societal order (I guess you mean decision making processes) would be handled in a similar way, so in councils where everyone can participate.
Crime, and general disturbances to the social order would have to be handled through social conditioning and preventative action. One important factor in this is that most crimes happen due to inequality and people acting out of desperation. That source would be probably mostly eliminated. Things like bigotry or rape or something are also, in my opinion happening in a lot of cases because of external social conditioning, so we would have to radically rethink things like education, parenting etc. The capital class also loves to push racism, sexism etc. through the media they controll to protect their own interests. The bugiorsy would of course not exist in my vision of anarchism. Trauma from war or other forms of capitalist exploitation, which could cause you to be sick and do crimes would of course also not exist, because there would be no capitalism nor imperialist nation states.
And still, we could not control for everything. For these cases, we would have to come together as the affected communities and decide on a cases by case basis. There should of course be general rules the community agreed on, but the circumstances should also be considered. A potential action for these cases could be rehabilitation, therapy ect., helping the victims fix the harm caused by the crime and in extreme cases maybe shunning an individual from a community. Maybe we would also need something prison-like for really extreme cases, but I am not really sure about that.
If you want to look at some real world examples, of how (imperfect, but still impressive) real world implementations of this could look like, look at anarchist Spain, Rojava or the Zapatistas. I will note though, that Rojava and the Zapatistas don’t call themselves anarchist, but their ideas are still really closely aligned with what I am talking about.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
My question to you is this, what vision should we strive for in your opinion? No system is ever perfect, but it does need to have a considerable degree of practicality in order to exist in the real world for an extended period of time.
But this a contradictory notion, is it not? Marxism is an inherently authortarian ideology in both theory and practice, which is why every attempt at it in history has resulted in some tyrannical regime. The idea that you can collectivize an entire economy and redistribute resource as the “collective” (read: government) deems necessary is simply impossible without a great deal of violence, coercion, and theft involved. The only way this idea could work without tyranny is if everybody in a society can magically agree to everything, which again, is impossible. There will always be people who will disagree, people who will resist, and people who will refuse to participate. That’s just how humans are. But if these types of people are allowed to do as they wish, then the system collapses in on itself. This is why communist regimes end up killing so many people in their quest to achieve communism, but that in of itself is the reason why communism is widely considered a failure as an ideology.
I think you misunderstood the point that I was making in my scenarios. I was pointing out how you can’t have order without inequality. One of the hallmark defining features of civilization is inequality, not in the sense of wealth, but in the sense of power. In order for people to organize in a society there needs to be people who have disporportaite levels of power and authority that grants them the ability to oversee, manage, and instruct people to act in certains ways in order achieve predefined goals. In other words, if you want a functional society, you need heiarchies.
Also, social heirarchies don’t exist because of capitalism, they exist because it’s an incredibly useful trait that social animals like humans evolved to better survive in the wild.
Like I was saying earlier, things like this don’t exist because of capitalism. If your claims about capitalism were true then there wouldn’t be any notion of things like war, racism, crime, and so on before the 17th and 18th centuries when capitalism formed, but that’s clearly not the case because these all existed long before recorded history were a thing. In fact, a lot of these traits can be found in our closest ape relatives, which means that they’re a product of our evolution.
Humans are tribal beings, and our ape brains are literally designed to ensure our survival in the wild. The way that we survived in nature is by forming small communities that we depended on our survival. If you lost your community, you’re screwed. Therefore, we evolved to become very protective of our tribes. We are inately catious change and hostile to outsiders because they could threaten the stability of our community, and thus our survival. In modern times tribalism comes in different forms whether its religion, race, sex, sexual orientation, political affilation, nationality, and so on. Even if you manage to eradicate one, another will come and take its place. Obviously we should strive to treat everybody with equal kindness and respect, but we also have to acknowledge that this isn’t something that be conditioned away with a change in economics or politics.
That’s already the case now, it’s called the justice system. However, you can’t have a justice system without a government that monoplizes violence. You need a government to have a police force that enforces rules and carries out punishments… but if that’s the case then we’re no longer in anarchist situation.
Impressive how? I think all three are considerable failures. They didn’t manage to last long and they didn’t achieve anything notable.
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Also the crime thing, what I meant about coming together as a community was assembling councils of people that have expertise in how to handle this, who decide together and enforcing the decisions not through state violence but through collective action by the community.
BennyTheExplorer@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The problem of anarchism is that it goes basically against everything, that we were taught to assume about the world, because the system can only work, if the people, who are oppressed by it think, that it couldn’t have been different. We need to work hard to be open minded and challenge our most basic assumptions.
That is just wrong. Marx was actually stonchly against authoritarianism, he argued for workplace democracy and was against nation states as a concept. He defined communism as a stateless, classless society. So, even though the Soviet Union pretended to be Marxist or communist, they were wrong. At least if you go by what most leftists thinkers understand as communism.
You seem to be conflating authoritarianism and violence. Yeah, a revolution might be violent. But the status quo is already incredibly violent, so it might be the most sensible option we have.
What makes you think that? There is actually quite a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary (newrepublic.com/…/dawn-everything-book-review-ear…) (while I find the evidence cited in that article to be quite interressting, I don’t agree with all the conclusions they come to).
Community does not necessarily need violence towards outsiders. In fact, according to a lot of scientists, human societies were very peaceful for a very long time (ancient-origins.net/…/debate-continues-stone-age-…). So the claim, that war or racism is in our human nature is ridiculous.
Almost as if there were other authoritarian systems, that tried to protect the interests of their ruling classes before capitalism.
Apes are racist and wage war? That seems interesting, where can I learn more?
Almost as if every capitalist government is doing everything they can to strike down these attempts because if they became successful, they would make other systems look bad.
But also, the Zapatistas still exist and have existed since 1994, so we don’t know yet, how long they will last. And yeah, it is really impressive to build an egalitarian, system with flat power structures amidst overwhelming resistance by governments with hugely powerful military force.