this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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I don't actually know all that much about it, but the anarchists that I know are all about communities and mutual support and stuff. So I guess they think government is bad and communities supporting each other is good.
Personally I wonder what they'd call it when a community gets really good at providing a particular type of support and they agree to pool their resources to efficiently provide said support to all members of the community.
Yes yes and then they discover that managing that shared pool of resources is quite the job so they all decide on a few key people to take on the task with specific roles. I think we're going somewhere with this!
So? Rotating certain roles in society is part of anarchist theory and common practice in anarchist organizations. Besides anarchists aren't opposed to assigning certain roles or managing resources. The point is how you do it i.e by actual democratic means.
But nobody is appointed any role for life or until a higher boss says so, this is the key difference. Also the decisions on that role are not done in a vacuum, they can't give orders and expect anyone to blindly follow it and never question. They have to be aligned with what the community wants, and if the person doesn't act accordingly anyone can step in.
Just how though? How does this get agreed upon without some threat of violence or top down hierarchy.
Consensus. And those who don't agree are free to separate and do their own thing based on their own consensus.
If you can't get the consensus/consent of the people your ideas will impact, you have no right to execute on those ideas.
Cooperatives do that. Hippie communities did it to some degree. Elected politicians swearing on representing the people who voted for them, in principle, should do the same thing.
And you know what would be great? If the truly anarchist communities where this actually happened were left to their own devices instead of being interfered by big bad countries who are afraid of "communism"
No, it really isn't... people have done that for millenia.
Not for the population numbers of modern nations, though. Managing a little town is one thing, millions of people is another.
No-one is qualified to make decisions for that many people, Clyde - the limits of hierarchical power systems is pretty evident.
Do you really think Biden himself decides which pothole in your street will be fixed today? Decentralizing power is not some arcane mystery.
You're basically describing a coop.
The thing is that these resources could get withdrawn in case that community can't won't supply that support anymore.
Most of them would say, "close enough."