this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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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.
The way I see it, anarchism leaves nothing but openings. Your egalitarian paradise only needs one family to want to seize power gather weapons and find like minded people to form a feudal military organization and they can start picking off and dominating families one by one. Individuals would not be able to stand against this centralized power and the time it would take to meet, agree, and mobilize a militia wouldn't help.
It isn't that anarchism evolves into feudalism, it's that it takes centralized power to resist centralized power. And as soon as you start concentrating power, having a standing army with wages, or other centralized systems to pool community resources, that's government. Even, yes, a descentralized non-capitalist deregulated egalitarian democracy.
It doesn't bother me that people want this kind of system, it bothers me that people want to call this simplified form of community governance "anarchy" which is by definition "the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government" because as soon as you start imposing rules like "we can expell a murderer if everyone else votes to" it becomes a simple form of communal government and the definition no longer applies.
Long lived anarchist societies [1] have traditions and structures that resist this sort of thing. Morality tales, traditions that shame those who aim to put themselves above others, and a tradition of armed self defense serve to prevent subversion from within. These things tend to be frustrated early. If your neighbor gets "picked off" or joins a cult of personality are you going to sit around and wait for it to happen to you or are you going to get your neighbors together and put a stop to it. You're right that individuals cannot stand up to such a threat, that's precisely why they'll form a militia to stop it. Ideally such things can be resolved with words but violence is a perfectly rational response to such a threat.
Centralized power is actually pretty bad at holding ground and subjugating populations. They have to build whole expensive structures of social control to ensure soldiers will fight. As soon as that structure is less convincing than a losing fight they run. The people being subjugated need no such structure. They have every reason to fight to protect themselves, their family, their community, and way of life.
Nothing I've described goes against your definition. A group of people deciding not to feed, house, or allow someone to stay in their midst is not a heirarchy. It's also not government. Just as a group is free to associate it is also free to disassociate.
So let's say we do it. We transform our country and it becomes everything you hoped and then the neighboring country invades. How does the anarchist society stand against that? How do they have a militia that can operate beyond the immediate resources of each member (beyond begging door to door)? How do you maintain supply lines without people doing that full time? How do you buy supplies without taxes to pay for them? How do you administer supplies without someone doing that full time? How do we respond to rockets fired into our territory? Does Bob have an anti missile system in the barn?
It just seems like a nice idea but too fragile to succeed.