this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
272 points (92.2% liked)
Asklemmy
45289 readers
2862 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People tend to think of anarchism as a power vacuum. As soon as a charismatic person comes in they'll start gaining more and more following. But that's not really how it works. Anarchy is about filling that vacuum with everyone. If a decision needs to be made you bring in everyone the situation effects to make it. You start at the level of a household to neighborhood to watershed to biosphere. A charismatic wanabe tyrant will be frustrated every step they take towards getting more power.
Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power. They enable people to guide their own lives and improve their communities. When violence occurs, when agreements are broken the community decided what is too be done.
All that assumes you're already there. One of the primary differences between anarchists and MLMs (Marxist Leninist Maoists) isn't necessarily their longest term goals, it's the means by which they reach them. MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control in order to reach those goals. That brings the risk of capture and co-option of those structures. They've also accomplished incredible feats of human uplift so I wouldn't say their position is without merit.
Anarchists see the revolution coming about through a unity of means and ends. They create a better society by building it while the old one still stands. Their groups are horizontally organized. They create organizations to replace food production and distribution; and devlop strategies for housing distribution (squatting).
Like true Libertarianism, this assumes that people will be perfect, altruistic and cooperative.
They won't be. Eventually (quickly) someone will become a cult of personality or a bully and seize power.
See: America 2016/2024.
It is true libertarianism in the older socialist sense. It assumes most people will act in their own self interest. It assumes that most people are at their core social. It asserts that the structures of capitalist control: isolation, bigotry, corporate media and more have convinced people to act in destructive ways that neverless enable their survival. Capitalism also enables unempathetic narcissistic people to gain unjustified control over all of our lives.
Power vacuums demand to be filled. Anarchism leaves no openings. When early states began encroaching into stateless societies they had an easy time with patriarchal and other heirarchical societies. Bureaucracies and tyrants were easily subsumed by dethroning a leader and implanting a friendly local. Anarchist societies were another story. They were not habituated to authority, they fought tooth and nail to maintain their anarchy. I don't have access to my books right now but in a couple days I'll drop an excerpt from Worshiping Power that goes into detail on a couple of examples.
But humans have short memories. As soon as the pressure is off and the complacency sets in, someone will abuse it.
Humans have long memories when they want to. Some of the longest surviving cultures are very egalitarian. The San peoples of Africa for instance. Oral traditions have long told stories that impart moral lessons about how to treat the environment, animals, and other people. Anti-authotitarian traditions and education are quite effective. The idea that a person can own a hundred acres was, and could be again, as absurd as claiming a pig can fly not all that long ago.
You site a tribe of 65,000 primitives in Africa in a conversation about the modern, internet level, instant communication, spacefaring society of eight billion people. Their culture doesn't scale.
You may have the right idea but you're on the wrong path to proselytize for it. Eight billion people can't return to a hunter/gatherer society and squat down in the dust to grind grain on a rock for dinner.
I'm definitely not advocating for a return to hunter gathering. Billions would die. But I do think they have things to teach us.