/anarcho/ - Anarchism Board

>with the lack of state comes a lack of regulation, meaning the entirety of a community can fall prey to the power developed over time by the strongest and smartest people

There are numerous flawed assumptions in this argument and we will discuss them here. The key flaws are the confusion of exchange with capitalism and the typically impoverished propertarian vision that freedom is, essentially, the freedom to sell your liberty, to become a wage slave and so unfree. Looking at history, we can say that both these assumptions are wrong. Firstly, while markets and exchange have existed for thousands of years capitalism has not. Wage-labour is a relatively recent development and has been the dominant mode of production for, at best, a couple of hundred years. Secondly, few people (when given the choice) have freely become wage-slaves. Just as the children of slaves often viewed slavery as the "natural" order, so do current workers. Yet, as with chattel slavery, substantial state coercion was required to achieve such a "natural" system.

As discussed in section F.8, actually existing capitalism was not created by Nozick's process – it required substantial state intervention to separate workers from the means of production they used and to ensure, eventually, that the situation in which they sold their liberty to the property owner was considered "natural." Without that coercion, people do not seek to sell their liberty to others. Murray Bookchin summarised the historical record by noting that in "every precapitalist society, countervailing forces . . . existed to restrict the market economy. No less significantly, many precapitalist societies raised what they thought were insuperable obstacles to the penetration of the State into social life." He pointed to "the power of village communities to resist the invasion of trade and despotic political forms into society's abiding communal substrate." [The Ecology of Freedom, pp. 207-8] Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber notes that in the ancient Mediterranean world "[w]hile one does periodically run into evidence of arrangements which to the modern eye look like wage-labour contracts, on closer examination they almost always actually turn out to be contracts to rent slaves . . . Free men and women thus avoided anything remotely like wage-labour, seeing it as a matter, effectively, of slavery, renting themselves out." This means that wage labour "(as opposed to, say, receiving fees for professional services) involves a degree of subordination: a labourer has to be to some degree at the command of his or her employer. This is exactly why, through most of history, free men and women tended to avoid wage-labour, and why, for most of history, capitalism . . . never emerged." [Possibilities, p. 92]

Thus while the idea that people will happily become wage slaves may be somewhat common place today (particularly with supporters of capitalism) the evidence of history is that people, given a choice, will prefer self-employment and resist wage labour (often to the death). As E. P. Thompson noted, for workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-labourer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right." [The Making of the English Working Class, p. 599] Over one hundred years later, the rural working class of Aragon showed the same dislike of wage slavery. After Communist troops destroyed their self-managed collectives, the "[d]ispossessed peasants, intransigent collectivists, refused to work in a system of private property, and were even less willing to rent out their labour." [Jose Peirats, Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution, p. 258] The rural economy collapsed as the former collectivists refused to be the servants of the few.

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI4.html#seci412

>entrepreneurship rewards those who create products and services that improve quality of life. Taking away this award system slows development and progress.

It is often argued that anarcho-communism and other forms of non-market libertarian-socialism would promote inefficiency and unproductive work. The basis of this argument is that without market forces to discipline workers and the profit motive to reward them, workers would have no incentive to work in a way which minimises time or resources. The net effect of this would be inefficient use of recourses, particularly an individual's time.

This is a valid point in some ways; for example, a society can (potentially) benefit from increasing productivity as the less time and resources it takes to produce a certain good, the more of both it gains for other activities (although, of course, in a class society the benefits of increased productivity generally accrue to, first and foremost, those at the top and, for the rest, the "other activities" mean more work). Indeed, for an individual, a decent society depends on people having time available for them to do what they want, to develop themselves in whatever way they want, to enjoy themselves. In addition, doing more with less can have a positive environment impact as well. It is for these reasons that an anarchist society would be interested in promoting efficiency and productiveness during production.

A free society will undoubtedly create new criteria for what counts as an efficient use of resources and time. What passes for "efficient" use under capitalism often means what is efficient in increasing the power and profits of the few, without regard to the wasteful use of individual time, energy and potential as well as environmental and social costs. Such a narrow criteria for decision making or evaluating efficient production will not exist in an anarchist society (see our discussion of the irrational nature of the price mechanism in section I.1.2, for example). When we use the term efficiency we mean the dictionary definition of efficiency (i.e. reducing waste, maximising use of resources) rather than what the capitalist market distorts this into (i.e. what creates most profits for the boss).

While capitalism has turned improvements in productivity as a means of increasing work, enriching the few and generally proletarianising the working class, a free society would take a different approach to the problem. As argued in section I.4.3, a communist-anarchist society would be based upon the principle of "for some much per day (in money today, in labour tomorrow) you are entitled to satisfy – luxury excepted – this or the other of your wants." [Peter Kropotkin, Small Communal Experiments and why the fail, p. 8] Building upon this, we can imagine a situation where the average output for a given industry in a given amount of time is used to encourage efficiency and productivity. If a given syndicate can produce this average output with at least average quality in less time than the agreed average/minimum (and without causing ecological or social externalities, of course) then the members of that syndicate can and should have that time off.

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI4.html#seci416

>no centralization means effectively mob rule, simply a far less refined version of democracy

While the "tyranny of the majority" objection does contain an important point, it is often raised for self-serving reasons. This is because those who have historically raised the issue (for example, and as discussed in section B.2.5, creators of the 1789 American constitution like Hamilton and Madison) saw the minority to be protected as the rich. In other words, the objection is not opposed to majority tyranny as such (they have no objections when the majority support their right to their riches and powers) but rather attempts of the majority to change their society to a fairer and freer one. Such concerns can easily be dismissed as an ingenious argument in favour of rule by the few – particularly as its proponents (such as the propertarian right and other defenders of capitalism) have no problem with the autocratic rule of property owners over their wage-slaves!

However, as noted, the objection to majority rule does contain a valid point and one which anarchists have addressed – namely, what about minority freedom within a self-managed society? So this is a danger, one raised by people who are most definitely not seeking minority rule. For example, someone who was sympathetic to anarchism, George Orwell, expressed this fear:

"the totalitarian tendency which is explicit in the anarchist . . . vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But pubic opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else." [Inside the Whale and Other Essays, p. 132]

There is, of course, this danger in any society, be its decision making structure direct (anarchy) or indirect (by some form of government). However, this does not really address the issue to point out this obvious fact. Anarchists are at the forefront in expressing concern about it, recognising that the majority is often a threat to freedom by its fear of change (see, for example, Emma Goldman's classic essay "Minorities versus Majorities"). We are well aware that the mass, as long as the individuals within it do not free themselves, can be a dead-weight on others, resisting change and enforcing conformity. As Goldman argued, "even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual the most." [Red Emma Speaks, p. 116] Hence Malatesta's comment that anarchists "have the special mission of being vigilant custodians of freedom, against all aspirants to power and against the possible tyranny of the majority." [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 161]

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI5.html#seci56

>a community based on mutually agreed peace can easily fall victim to one or two people who have the ability to defend themselves

A common objection to anarchism is that an anarchist society will be vulnerable to be taken over by thugs or those who seek power. A similar argument is that a group without a leadership structure becomes open to charismatic leaders so anarchy would just lead to tyranny.

For anarchists, such arguments are strange. Society already is run by thugs and/or the off-spring of thugs. Kings were originally just successful thugs who succeeded in imposing their domination over a given territorial area. The modern state has evolved from the structure created to impose this domination. Similarly with property, with most legal titles to land being traced back to its violent seizure by thugs who then passed it on to their children who then sold it or gave it to their offspring. The origins of the current system in violence can be seen by the continued use of violence by the state and capitalists to enforce and protect their domination over society. When push comes to shove, the dominant class will happily re-discover their thug past and employ extreme violence to maintain their privileges. The descent of large parts of Europe into Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, or Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973 indicates how far they will go. As Peter Arshinov argued (in a slightly different context):

"Statists fear free people. They claim that without authority people will lose the anchor of sociability, will dissipate themselves, and will return to savagery. This is obviously rubbish. It is taken seriously by idlers, lovers of authority and of the labour of others, or by blind thinkers of bourgeois society. The liberation of the people in reality leads to the degeneration and return to savagery, not of the people, but of those who, thanks to power and privilege, live from the labour of the people's arms and from the blood of the people's veins . . . The liberation of the people leads to the savagery of those who live from its enslavement." [The History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 85]

Anarchists are not impressed with the argument that anarchy would be unable to stop thugs seizing power. It ignores the fact that we live in a society where the power-hungry already hold power. As an argument against anarchism it fails and is, in fact, an argument against hierarchical societies.

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI5.html#seci511

>no regulated infastructure means no properly maintained homes and roads unless necessary staff volunteer and agree to follow some sort of leadership

It depends on the type of anarchist society you are talking about. Different anarchists propose different solutions.

In an individualist-mutualist society, for example, health care and other public services would be provided by individuals or co-operatives on a pay-for-use basis. It would be likely that individuals or co-operatives/associations would subscribe to various insurance providers or enter into direct contracts with health care providers. Thus the system would be similar to privatised health care but without the profit margins as competition, it is hoped, would drive prices down to cost.

Other anarchists reject such a system. They are in favour of socialising health care and other public services. They argue that a privatised system would only be able to meet the requirements of those who can afford to pay for it and so would be unjust and unfair. In addition, such systems would have higher overheads (the need to pay share-holders and the wages of management, most obviously) as well as charge more (privatised public utilities under capitalism have tended to charge consumers more, unsurprisingly as by their very nature they are natural monopolies).

Looking at health care, for example, the need for medical attention is not dependent on income and so a civilised society would recognise this fact. Under capitalism, profit-maximising medical insurance sets premiums according to the risks of the insured getting ill or injured, with the riskiest not being able to find insurance at any price. Private insurers shun entire industries as too dangerous for their profits due to the likelihood of accidents or illness. They review contracts regularly and drop people who get sick for the slightest reason (understandably, given that they make profits by minimising payouts for treatment). Hardly a vision to inspire a free society or one compatible with equality and mutual respect.

Therefore, most anarchists are in favour of a socialised and universal health-care system for both ethical and efficiency reasons (see section I.4.10 for more details). Needless to say, an anarchist system of socialised health care would differ in many ways to the current systems of universal health-care provided by the state (which, while called socialised medicine by its enemies is better described as nationalised medicine – although it should be stressed that this is better than the privatised system). Such a system of socialised health-care will be built from the bottom-up and based around the local commune. In a social anarchist society, "medical services . . . will be free of charge to all inhabitants of the commune. The doctors will not be like capitalists, trying to extract the greatest profit from their unfortunate patients. They will be employed by the commune and expected to treat all who need their services." Moreover, prevention will play an important part, as "medical treatment is only the curative side of the science of health care; it is not enough to treat the sick, it is also necessary to prevent disease. That is the true function of hygiene." [James Guillaume, "On Building the New Social Order", pp. 356-79,Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 371] The same would go for other public services and works.

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI5.html#seci512

>if the internet is still available in such a scenario, there would be no way to enforce net neutrality and the world wide web is now entirely under the control of service providers

No, far from it. It is obvious that, as Kropotkin put it, "[n]o society is possible without certain principles of morality generally recognised. If everyone grew accustomed to deceiving his fellow-men; if we never could rely on each other's promise and words; if everyone treated his fellow as an enemy, against whom every means of warfare is justified – no society could exist." [Anarchism, p. 73] However, this does not mean that a legal system (with its resultant bureaucracy, vested interests and inhumanity) is the best way to protect individual rights within a society.

What anarchists propose instead of the current legal system (or an alternative law system based on religious or "natural" laws) is custom – namely the development of living "rules of thumb" which express what a society considers as right at any given moment. However, the question arises, if an agreed set of principles is used to determine the just outcome, in what way would this differ from laws?

The difference is that the "order of custom" would prevail rather than the "rule of law". Custom is a body of living institutions that enjoys the support of the body politic, whereas law is a codified (read dead) body of institutions that separates social control from moral force. This, as anyone observing modern Western society can testify, alienates everyone. A just outcome is the predictable, but not necessarily the inevitable, outcome of interpersonal conflict because in an anarchistic society people are trusted to do it themselves. Anarchists think people have to grow up in a social environment free from the confusions generated by a fundamental discrepancy between morality, and social control, to fully appreciate the implications. However, the essential ingredient is the investment of trust, by the community, in people to come up with functional solutions to interpersonal conflict. This stands in sharp contrast with the present situation of people being infantilised by the state through a constant bombardment of fixed social structures removing all possibility of people developing their own unique solutions.

Therefore, anarchists recognise that social custom changes with society. What was once considered "normal" or "natural" may become to be seen as oppressive and hateful. This is because the "conception of good or evil varies according to the degree of intelligence or of knowledge acquired. There is nothing unchangeable about it." [Kropotkin, Op. Cit., p. 92] Only by removing the dead hand of the past can society's ethical base develop and grow with the individuals that make it up (see section A.2.19 for a discussion of anarchist ethics).

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secI7.html#seci73

>ayncrapsim leads to oligarchies, ancommunism requires regulation to maintain

Anyone who has followed political discussion on the net has probably come across people calling themselves "libertarians" but arguing from a right-wing, pro-capitalist perspective. For most people outside of North America, this is weird as the term "libertarian" is almost always used in conjunction with "socialist" or "communist" (particularly in Europe and, it should be stressed, historically in America). In the US, though, the Right has partially succeeded in appropriating the term "libertarian" for itself. Even stranger is that a few of these right-wingers have started calling themselves "anarchists" in what must be one of the finest examples of an oxymoron in the English language: ""anarcho"-capitalist"!!!

Arguing with fools is seldom rewarded, but to let their foolishness to go unchallenged risks allowing them to deceive those who are new to anarchism. This is what this section of the FAQ is for, to show why the claims of these "anarchist" capitalists are false. Anarchism has always been anti-capitalist and any "anarchism" that claims otherwise cannot be part of the anarchist tradition. It is important to stress that anarchist opposition to the so-called capitalist "anarchists" do not reflect some kind of debate within anarchism, as many of these types like to pretend, but a debate between anarchism and its old enemy, capitalism. In many ways this debate mirrors the one between Peter Kropotkin and Herbert Spencer (an English capitalist minimal statist) at the turn the 19th century and, as such, it is hardly new.

At that time, people like Spencer tended to call themselves "liberals" while, as Bookchin noted, "libertarian" was "a term created by nineteenth-century European anarchists, not by contemporary American right-wing proprietarians." [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 57] David Goodway concurs, stating that "libertarian" has been "frequently employed by anarchists" as an alternative name for our politics for over a century. However, the "situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of . . . extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy . . . and [its advocates] adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism.' It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition." [Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, p. 4] This appropriation of the term "libertarian" by the right not only has bred confusion, but also protest as anarchists have tried to point out the obvious, namely that capitalism is marked by authoritarian social relationships and so there are good reasons for anarchism being a fundamentally anti-capitalist socio-political theory and movement. That a minority of the right "libertarians" have also tried to appropriate "anarchist" to describe their authoritarian politics is something almost all anarchists reject and oppose.

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secFcon.html

>>8904

You are supposed to read the entire link, not just the quote extract I posted.

>>8905

how much time do you think I have

>>8906

Considering you are willing to get into long arguments on image boards that will probably result fruitless, I'd say more than you think.

Really, just read the FAQ. It is just the bare minimum effort if you want to discuss anarchism seriously.

>>8907

Why even have a board for discussing the topic at hand when there's apparently some sort of all-knowing final say type source for setting arguments?

>>8908

It's just that we get these questions all the time and, at least I personally, got bored of it after a while.

I prefer discussing theory that is somewhat above these basic points when I even have to explain how capital is getting accumulated and how people are organizing to struggle.

Besides, and this may come as a surprise to you, anarchism is a very complex social, philosophical, political, economic and even scientific theory. The problem is that you are demanding common sense arguments to defeat the "common sense" of capitalism that has been implanted on you by a process we call "hegemony." If you really want to learn anarchism, we are here to help. But we must admit that for you to understand it you must want to understand it enough to put some effort into it.

This would be the same if you wanted to learn programming or acrobatics, but for some reason non-hegemonic sociopolitical theories are presumed to be plain and basic to anyone.

>>8909

It doesn't surprise me, because I can't understand it. If it were as simple as "fuck the police" then I could wrap my head around it more easily. Currently, there seems to be far too much romanticism with the idea of a lack of state for people to critically look at what is actually here. Getting someone to criticize their own belief is damn near impossible, and as such my real questions never truly get answered.

>>8910

Read the AFAQ, please. It was literally made to answer this kind of entry-level questions.

>Getting someone to criticize their own belief is damn near impossible, and as such my real questions never truly get answered.

If your purpose here was to get us to question our politics instead of helping you critique yours, you should have just said so.