> Anarchists believe in unmediated relations between free individuals, the absence of any coercive or alienating forces in societies, and an unquestionable, universal right to self-determination.
If that sounds difficult to implement, I agree! I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life. At the scale of society I see Marxism as just as important. How to square the two? I don't know
How to make a political program out of anarchism? I don't know, but I think it'll be possible with the right philosophical and scientific mindset. I think it would be a mindset quite radically different from how we currently approach the world.
There are some immediate problems to ponder. For example, my fist is an unmediated relation between individuals. Does the idea of free individual preclude it? You can't base your politics only on what you think ought to be, but also how it ought to change when there is a violation of that preferred condition. Clearly there are times when a good anarchist (whatever that is) will throw a punch, and how ought an anarchist society deal with that?
I like The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin as a thoughtful examination of society that tries to grapple with such small and dirty questions. As well as bigger questions of course.
In that quote, I don't see a solution, or a goal, but an orientation. It frames the world in a way that asks you to focus on certain possibilities that might seem remote, but have existed and will exist so long as humanity exists. That's why I'm an anarchist and why I like and agree with this piece.
> Anarchists believe in unmediated relations between free individuals, the absence of any coercive or alienating forces in societies, and an unquestionable, universal right to self-determination
If you and I can interface “unmediated” and freely, and I decide to use that freedom to take your shit, you need a “coercive or alienating force” to correct the wrong. Controlling this force is the history of civilisation.
In this video[0], economist Richard Wolff talks about all the things he didn't learn studying economics at the US's most prestigious universities, because they were never mentioned. Fascinating talk. Towards the end he talks of a Spanish company run by its workers, which sounds like it has successfully transformed work for those people to something democratic, and, well, something free from what anarchists (and we all..uh 99% of us anyway) want to be free from. It sounds doable to extend that to other areas of life. Watch it! Highly enlightening ...and 'hope you can believe in' isn't that common nowadays.
> How to make a political program out of anarchism?
Just give up radicalizing it. Accept the society AS IS as a starting point and start stripping the state of its powers and ambitions one by one. Read through the laws, legalize everything that can be legalized fairly safely (e.g. legalize drugs but don't hurry to legalize private atomic weapons :-)) at particular stage, remove requirements that are not really necessary (e.g. repeal copyrights enforcement but keep net neutrality). It is crucial to implement this process in a mindful and responsible way, i.e. avoiding dissolution of government institutions that do an important job and have no decent private alternatives established to the moment or repealing regulations that are there to limit the powers of corporations (which will certainly seek to establish tyranny over the nation as soon as the forces binding them weaken).
> We reject all societal processes that break that link — such as private property, exchange relations, division of labor, and democracy.
This is a way too radical idea that can hardly be considered constructive or viable. There can be no hope for a society anything close to real to survive and prosper with no body of power over them unless all its members respect property and interests, safety and privacy, freedom and dignity of other members the way they would like others to respect those of their own. Also division of labor is an absolutely natural thing, goods and services are to be subjects of free market, it is perfectly correct for a doctor to concentrate on healing people and expect the people to care about his needs in exchange so he won't waste time e.g. cultivating foods to feed his family.
The ultimate goal is not to destroy the system. It is to make every individual as free (keeping in mind that security is a precondition to freedom) as possible without infringing freedom of their neighbour, to decentralize and distribute power as uniformly as possible (while still letting and encouraging experts to make important decisions) and to establish Nash equilibrium so only minor fluctuations will occur and nobody will be able to gain enough power to become the new tyrant.
I respect anarchists for offering thorough criticisms of the democratic status quo that too many people take for granted.
I would even like to see a few thousand anarchists start their own society and try to put their theories into practice on an artificial island or something. Even if they all need to be rescued by UN forces at the end of the day, the experiment will provide the rest of humanity with valuable insights that philosophers and anthropologists can grapple with for decades to come.
For my taste, though, both anarchism and libertarianism seem to be based on an overly optimistic view of human nature. Maybe they'll become more realistic once we've either evolved or augmented ourselves to a much higher level of intelligence and conscience.
Not to get too philosophical, but the problem with anarchism is rooted in our evolution and in natural selection itself.
Our strength and security comes from our ability to assemble and organize.
Then there's also some game theory involved with the state of the world right now. If we all agree to dismantle our organizational apparatus and military infrastructure then the last group to do so would be at quite an advantage to take over. Not too unlike the nuclear situation.
> The concept of the “majority” is particularly troubling. By always accepting the will of the majority, democracy allows for majorities to have an absolute tyranny over everyone else. This means that in the winner-take-all context of democracy, minorities have no influence over decisions that are made. This is even worse than it seems, since the “majority” in any given situation is usually not even the majority of a population, but actually just the largest group of many minorities.
The U.S. FPTP winner-take all voting system is quite bad, as in any given district or city, and so on, not just a majority of people, but a minority can decide the representative for the whole district in Congress (which in case it's not clear, that's worse than the majority deciding the winner). It's not uncommon for people to become members of Congress with only 35% support of their constituents. I don't know what you call that, but I would say it's hardly democratic. I don't know how FPTP even made its way on the list of voting systems to be used in democratic countries.
As for addressing the similar criticism of majority rule in a democracy, there are ways to mitigate the problem of (real) minorities not having their concerns addressed at all, and that's also with more representative voting systems rather than winner-take-all voting systems.
For instance, with STV, you could elect 3-5 different representatives, each from a different party or independent. I think it would be way better in terms of addressing certain minorities' issues than the existing FPTP winner-takes-all voting system where either a Republican or a Democrat gets to represent a certain district for typically ~20 years (the long time periods are caused by both FPTP -- easy for the biggest party locally to continue winning -- and gerrymandering). Governments would have to be formed with coalitions, which means it usually won't be possible to form a majority government without taking the minority parties' or the groups of indepndents' concerns into account.
> At the scale of society I see Marxism as just as important.
what'd I just read? I think it was something like "100 million people died in the 20th century" because Marxism [1]
> How to make a political program out of anarchism?
nah bruh... the article is explicit:
> We are anti-political because we are interested in the self-organization of the power of individuals. This tension towards self-organization is completely orthogonal to democracy in any of its various forms.
>I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life.
That's nice to hear, me and my friends feel that way too. BTW we're coming to take your stuff, enslave your family, and kill you of course. Isn't freedom from the oppressive state just great?
Anywhere you have two or more people "asserting a direct and unobstructed link between thought and action, between desires and their free fulfillment" you are going to have conflict... which means not everyone is going to be able to get and do everything and anything they want.
Notice that this has nothing to do with democracy. It's an inevitable consequence of the existence of people who want things.
Anarchists don't think that they will all just be able to do anything they want. They believe that the way people can reach a compromise with each other, given the constraints you mention, could be very different. They want it to happen on a horizontal and decentralised level, without the institutional hierarchies of the power structures we are forced to obey now.
With all due respect I would have liked if the hackernews moderators had kept my original headline "An Anarchist Critique of Democracy by Moxie Marlinspike (Signal SMS), Windy Hart"
I thought this article/transcript was of interest to hackernews in a large part due to one of the two authors being the author of the Open Whisper Systems Signal SMS app.
I understand the feeling, but we've learned from experience that HN works better when the focus is on content rather than personalities, especially in titles.
We've also learned that HN can't really have a substantive discussion about ideology. Something about open internet forums causes such discussions to revert to the mean, and from there to the bottom of the barrel, pretty quickly. But at least your submission was off the beaten track!
A list of things that are wrong is pretty boring without plausible alternatives. Like, even if you're right, it doesn't matter because we're not comparing The Bad Thing to The Absence Of All Those Bad Things. That's trivial, of course bad things are bad.
We're comparing The Bad Thing to A Different Set of Tradeoffs. That's the part I want to see.
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston S Churchill, November 11, 1947
"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
Plato compares different forms of government in the Politician dialogue (oligarchy/aristocracy, tyranny/monarchy, democracy; 302-303), where the democracy is described as the least effective form of government among all when good and honest instances of each are compared, and the least harmful one when bad and corrupt instances are compared. That's because it's static given how much effort and involvement it takes to even decide on minutia; and big, important decisions are very hard to make. Today this definition seems relevant and partly true to me, and I believe it is mostly an acceptable trade-off given the tendency to corruption of those who are in power (I have this vague thought that this tendency is probably a part of the stereotype of the politically-successful person).
If the relations between free individuals is unmediated, they can interact in any way they choose. So if a group agrees to pool their resources and impose their collective will on others, then you just lost your anarchy. To eliminate "coercive forces", you'd need to ensure that no group or individual can acquire leverage over another.
A big part of anarchist ideology is the notion of "solidarity". So if a group were to attempt to assert authority by coercive means like this, then people would ideally come together in solidarity to stop them. This is why anarchists and antifa show up to stop neo-nazis that are threatening minorities and other vulnerable groups.
They list lots of problems inherent in democracy. Then, in the conclusion, they hint that the next show/article is going to describe a reasonable system that doesn't have those problems.
With all due respect, if this is the best the anarchists have (and this article is from a respected individual and is decently written), you're fucked. These critiques are not new or without response. The problem is, this is 1000+ words of arguments about human nature, special pleading, etc, with NO sources. They describe known phenomena like control of the agenda and never call it that, I'm not sure if that's because they aren't aware of that term or they just fon't feel like attributing hundreds if not thousands of years of research before them. It'd be like if someone cloned Signal and acted like Moxie didn't exist.
Cite something, anything that scholars who study politics and democracies have written, don't put forward these vague critiques with nothing backing it up. Many arguments that seem intuitive are wrong when faced with evidence, and this article and anarchists in general seem to forget that democracies have certain features (and misfeatures) that are responses to real world situations.
Anarchism is a political ideology that's never met the real world, like a lot of ideologies on HN and elsewhere. This might convince the random Internet reader, but it's not going to convince anyone who has studied the topic.
> Anarchism is a political ideology that's never met the real world, like a lot of ideologies on HN and elsewhere. This might convince the random Internet reader, but it's not going to convince anyone who has studied the topic.
Although there have been some widespread and fairly comprehensive implementations of anarchism, namely the Makhnovists in the Ukraine and the Spanish Revolution in Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and some parts of the Valencian Community, anarchism is more of a political tension "from where you are standing right now" than an attempt to conquer a territory to establish anarchism. That should follow from the name itself.
The Situationist movement had some enduring effect on French culture from the first-person perspective. (Situationism is not anarchist, but it is libertarian and communist). The Spanish revolution less so, because it was followed by General Franco's rule.
Let's take another political document I selected at random.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Should we dismiss this statement as irrelevant since the authors did not cite any sources? In fact, they go further, they reject any arguments from authority and hold this statements as self-evident! They don't even cite Aristotle or other "scholars who study politics and democracies".
A political statement is not falsifiable. To a 1000+ essay saying "I think anarchy trumps democracy as a political system", dismissing it because they don't cite source is a completely meaningless attack.
There are quite a few examples of serious academics that have endorsed anarchism and have more robust arguments against the status quo. Chomsky and Graeber are very well-regarded and have works on the topic that are properly cited the way you'd like.
That said, anarchism is all about refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy in the institutions it critiques. It's not surprising that these writers don't conform to your idea of how such a text should be organised. A dense, academic format also doesn't make for very good propaganda either.
I very much enjoyed (and even laughed) reading your response.
It’s very concerning to see people talk so positively
about anarchy. Another word for anarchy is “nihilism”, which is its philosophical twin.
Neither of these words are used a lot today, but “nihilism” you’ll see mentioned a lot in the build-up to WWII.
Am currently reading the below book, which argues in its final chapter that a German invasion of Poland is imminent and is the next course of action Hitler will take. It was published in May 1939 in German, and translated in August 1939 to English. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939.
The author is very clear that for all their flaws, capitalism and democracy are very reformable. And that a dictatorship of Fascism or Communism will dazzle with early successes before descending into violence both internally and externally.
Amazing to see this discussion on HN! Here's another article that I'm pretty fond that explores how modern democracy has failed us and what we might be better off with in its place:
Imagine for the moment that anarchy-- the type with roots in 19th century Europe and fits and starts in Catalonia and Andalusia-- is the key to universal enlightenment and human cooperation. (Not saying it is, just a thought experiment-- humor me.)
Now imagine that there is a small but dedicated cabal of evil demons intent on keeping the world from coming to realize this truth. If you were an advisor to the cabal, how would you suggest they use their meager resources?
If it were me, here's what I would do:
1. Split the demons up and send each to a burgeoning center for anarchy.
2. Tell each demon to play up what is idiosyncratic and novel in that particular region's understanding of anarchy. Eschew both clear, standardized terminology and laymen's terms for something that sounds passionate, yet somehow also particular.
3. Discourage genre literacy, and don't cite sources.
4. Favor novelty over intellectual rigour.
5. Develop clever inside jokes.
6. When faced with a powerful intellectual adversary, fall back on tribalism.
And once the demons are comfortable in their new surroundings, the kicker:
7. Convince the demons that it is now safe for them to earnestly believe in their new form of fun-house-mirror anarchism. They are safe to defend and most importantly love the little tribe they have created.
Using such a technique, I'm fairly certain I could guide my demons to an easy victory. In the event that any of the disparate anarchist groups tries to band together in a spirit of cooperation or defense against a common adversary, passive-aggressive tribalistic infighting will eat up a critical mass of their resources!
*
Now, let's get back to reality and realize there is no such conspiracy to derail anarchism.
Still: mission accomplished, no?
Edit: wording. Also-- I'm only critiquing the concept of anarchism implicitly espoused by the authors. The anarchists of the early 20th century seemed to have suffered from a much different problem, which was the inability to manufacture enough arms-- to ward off both the fascists and the communists when they retook Barcelona, for example.
I thought all Anarchist now just called themselves Libertarians?
As a Punk Rock Kid I had Anarchist showing up at shows trying to get people to join the movement. Then all the way through the 90s it go crazier. I can;t tell how obnoxious and violent things got. Now 20 years later they are all Libertarians now. It is safe to say I am not a anarchist nor libertarian but I am amazed how many people fail to see the history of anarchy and libertarian thought.
First of all, violence is not Anarchism. The essence of Anarchy is non-violence. Google voluntaryism.
So yes, of course real anarchists identify as libertarians, anarchism is the embodiment of libertarian philosophy, especially the non-aggression principal. (NAP)
[+] [-] danharaj|8 years ago|reply
If that sounds difficult to implement, I agree! I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life. At the scale of society I see Marxism as just as important. How to square the two? I don't know
How to make a political program out of anarchism? I don't know, but I think it'll be possible with the right philosophical and scientific mindset. I think it would be a mindset quite radically different from how we currently approach the world.
There are some immediate problems to ponder. For example, my fist is an unmediated relation between individuals. Does the idea of free individual preclude it? You can't base your politics only on what you think ought to be, but also how it ought to change when there is a violation of that preferred condition. Clearly there are times when a good anarchist (whatever that is) will throw a punch, and how ought an anarchist society deal with that?
I like The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin as a thoughtful examination of society that tries to grapple with such small and dirty questions. As well as bigger questions of course.
In that quote, I don't see a solution, or a goal, but an orientation. It frames the world in a way that asks you to focus on certain possibilities that might seem remote, but have existed and will exist so long as humanity exists. That's why I'm an anarchist and why I like and agree with this piece.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
If you and I can interface “unmediated” and freely, and I decide to use that freedom to take your shit, you need a “coercive or alienating force” to correct the wrong. Controlling this force is the history of civilisation.
[+] [-] yesenadam|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc
[+] [-] qwerty456127|8 years ago|reply
Just give up radicalizing it. Accept the society AS IS as a starting point and start stripping the state of its powers and ambitions one by one. Read through the laws, legalize everything that can be legalized fairly safely (e.g. legalize drugs but don't hurry to legalize private atomic weapons :-)) at particular stage, remove requirements that are not really necessary (e.g. repeal copyrights enforcement but keep net neutrality). It is crucial to implement this process in a mindful and responsible way, i.e. avoiding dissolution of government institutions that do an important job and have no decent private alternatives established to the moment or repealing regulations that are there to limit the powers of corporations (which will certainly seek to establish tyranny over the nation as soon as the forces binding them weaken).
> We reject all societal processes that break that link — such as private property, exchange relations, division of labor, and democracy.
This is a way too radical idea that can hardly be considered constructive or viable. There can be no hope for a society anything close to real to survive and prosper with no body of power over them unless all its members respect property and interests, safety and privacy, freedom and dignity of other members the way they would like others to respect those of their own. Also division of labor is an absolutely natural thing, goods and services are to be subjects of free market, it is perfectly correct for a doctor to concentrate on healing people and expect the people to care about his needs in exchange so he won't waste time e.g. cultivating foods to feed his family.
The ultimate goal is not to destroy the system. It is to make every individual as free (keeping in mind that security is a precondition to freedom) as possible without infringing freedom of their neighbour, to decentralize and distribute power as uniformly as possible (while still letting and encouraging experts to make important decisions) and to establish Nash equilibrium so only minor fluctuations will occur and nobody will be able to gain enough power to become the new tyrant.
[+] [-] kijin|8 years ago|reply
I would even like to see a few thousand anarchists start their own society and try to put their theories into practice on an artificial island or something. Even if they all need to be rescued by UN forces at the end of the day, the experiment will provide the rest of humanity with valuable insights that philosophers and anthropologists can grapple with for decades to come.
For my taste, though, both anarchism and libertarianism seem to be based on an overly optimistic view of human nature. Maybe they'll become more realistic once we've either evolved or augmented ourselves to a much higher level of intelligence and conscience.
[+] [-] wybiral|8 years ago|reply
Our strength and security comes from our ability to assemble and organize.
Then there's also some game theory involved with the state of the world right now. If we all agree to dismantle our organizational apparatus and military infrastructure then the last group to do so would be at quite an advantage to take over. Not too unlike the nuclear situation.
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
Doesn't make for sweeping rhetoric though.
[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
http://thinkingofutils.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/anarch...
http://thinkingofutils.com/2017/04/freedom-bathtub-libertari...
Now onto my own criticism of the author's post:
> The concept of the “majority” is particularly troubling. By always accepting the will of the majority, democracy allows for majorities to have an absolute tyranny over everyone else. This means that in the winner-take-all context of democracy, minorities have no influence over decisions that are made. This is even worse than it seems, since the “majority” in any given situation is usually not even the majority of a population, but actually just the largest group of many minorities.
The U.S. FPTP winner-take all voting system is quite bad, as in any given district or city, and so on, not just a majority of people, but a minority can decide the representative for the whole district in Congress (which in case it's not clear, that's worse than the majority deciding the winner). It's not uncommon for people to become members of Congress with only 35% support of their constituents. I don't know what you call that, but I would say it's hardly democratic. I don't know how FPTP even made its way on the list of voting systems to be used in democratic countries.
As for addressing the similar criticism of majority rule in a democracy, there are ways to mitigate the problem of (real) minorities not having their concerns addressed at all, and that's also with more representative voting systems rather than winner-take-all voting systems.
For instance, with STV, you could elect 3-5 different representatives, each from a different party or independent. I think it would be way better in terms of addressing certain minorities' issues than the existing FPTP winner-takes-all voting system where either a Republican or a Democrat gets to represent a certain district for typically ~20 years (the long time periods are caused by both FPTP -- easy for the biggest party locally to continue winning -- and gerrymandering). Governments would have to be formed with coalitions, which means it usually won't be possible to form a majority government without taking the minority parties' or the groups of indepndents' concerns into account.
http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation
[+] [-] mr_spothawk|8 years ago|reply
what'd I just read? I think it was something like "100 million people died in the 20th century" because Marxism [1]
> How to make a political program out of anarchism?
nah bruh... the article is explicit:
> We are anti-political because we are interested in the self-organization of the power of individuals. This tension towards self-organization is completely orthogonal to democracy in any of its various forms.
[1] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/11/20/nicolae-one-hun...
[+] [-] MikkoFinell|8 years ago|reply
That's nice to hear, me and my friends feel that way too. BTW we're coming to take your stuff, enslave your family, and kill you of course. Isn't freedom from the oppressive state just great?
[+] [-] jmull|8 years ago|reply
Anywhere you have two or more people "asserting a direct and unobstructed link between thought and action, between desires and their free fulfillment" you are going to have conflict... which means not everyone is going to be able to get and do everything and anything they want.
Notice that this has nothing to do with democracy. It's an inevitable consequence of the existence of people who want things.
[+] [-] kiliantics|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pointfree|8 years ago|reply
I thought this article/transcript was of interest to hackernews in a large part due to one of the two authors being the author of the Open Whisper Systems Signal SMS app.
[+] [-] dang|8 years ago|reply
We've also learned that HN can't really have a substantive discussion about ideology. Something about open internet forums causes such discussions to revert to the mean, and from there to the bottom of the barrel, pretty quickly. But at least your submission was off the beaten track!
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pmichaud|8 years ago|reply
We're comparing The Bad Thing to A Different Set of Tradeoffs. That's the part I want to see.
[+] [-] fiatjaf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|8 years ago|reply
Source: https://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-...
[+] [-] ivm|8 years ago|reply
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
- Winston S Churchill
[+] [-] gkya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmaroon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xBA5ED|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiliantics|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mac01021|8 years ago|reply
But I can't find the next episode anywhere.
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|8 years ago|reply
Cite something, anything that scholars who study politics and democracies have written, don't put forward these vague critiques with nothing backing it up. Many arguments that seem intuitive are wrong when faced with evidence, and this article and anarchists in general seem to forget that democracies have certain features (and misfeatures) that are responses to real world situations.
Anarchism is a political ideology that's never met the real world, like a lot of ideologies on HN and elsewhere. This might convince the random Internet reader, but it's not going to convince anyone who has studied the topic.
Here's a few politics 101 cites that are decent:
https://www.amazon.com/Models-Democracy-3rd-David-Held/dp/08...
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Its-Critics-Robert-Dahl/dp/...
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Second-Robert-Dahl/dp/03001...
https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re...
Could tech people stick to what they are good at, or at least acknowledge the wider world of experience when they are making arguments?
[+] [-] pointfree|8 years ago|reply
Although there have been some widespread and fairly comprehensive implementations of anarchism, namely the Makhnovists in the Ukraine and the Spanish Revolution in Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and some parts of the Valencian Community, anarchism is more of a political tension "from where you are standing right now" than an attempt to conquer a territory to establish anarchism. That should follow from the name itself.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-th...
The Situationist movement had some enduring effect on French culture from the first-person perspective. (Situationism is not anarchist, but it is libertarian and communist). The Spanish revolution less so, because it was followed by General Franco's rule.
[+] [-] JetSpiegel|8 years ago|reply
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Should we dismiss this statement as irrelevant since the authors did not cite any sources? In fact, they go further, they reject any arguments from authority and hold this statements as self-evident! They don't even cite Aristotle or other "scholars who study politics and democracies".
A political statement is not falsifiable. To a 1000+ essay saying "I think anarchy trumps democracy as a political system", dismissing it because they don't cite source is a completely meaningless attack.
[+] [-] kiliantics|8 years ago|reply
That said, anarchism is all about refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy in the institutions it critiques. It's not surprising that these writers don't conform to your idea of how such a text should be organised. A dense, academic format also doesn't make for very good propaganda either.
[+] [-] Top19|8 years ago|reply
It’s very concerning to see people talk so positively about anarchy. Another word for anarchy is “nihilism”, which is its philosophical twin.
Neither of these words are used a lot today, but “nihilism” you’ll see mentioned a lot in the build-up to WWII.
Am currently reading the below book, which argues in its final chapter that a German invasion of Poland is imminent and is the next course of action Hitler will take. It was published in May 1939 in German, and translated in August 1939 to English. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939.
The author is very clear that for all their flaws, capitalism and democracy are very reformable. And that a dictatorship of Fascism or Communism will dazzle with early successes before descending into violence both internally and externally.
The Revolution Of Nihilism: Warning To The West https://www.amazon.com/dp/1258001071/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_RZCn...
[+] [-] kiliantics|8 years ago|reply
https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/29/feature-from-democracy-to-...
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
Here's a quick thought experiment:
Imagine for the moment that anarchy-- the type with roots in 19th century Europe and fits and starts in Catalonia and Andalusia-- is the key to universal enlightenment and human cooperation. (Not saying it is, just a thought experiment-- humor me.)
Now imagine that there is a small but dedicated cabal of evil demons intent on keeping the world from coming to realize this truth. If you were an advisor to the cabal, how would you suggest they use their meager resources?
If it were me, here's what I would do:
1. Split the demons up and send each to a burgeoning center for anarchy.
2. Tell each demon to play up what is idiosyncratic and novel in that particular region's understanding of anarchy. Eschew both clear, standardized terminology and laymen's terms for something that sounds passionate, yet somehow also particular.
3. Discourage genre literacy, and don't cite sources.
4. Favor novelty over intellectual rigour.
5. Develop clever inside jokes.
6. When faced with a powerful intellectual adversary, fall back on tribalism.
And once the demons are comfortable in their new surroundings, the kicker:
7. Convince the demons that it is now safe for them to earnestly believe in their new form of fun-house-mirror anarchism. They are safe to defend and most importantly love the little tribe they have created.
Using such a technique, I'm fairly certain I could guide my demons to an easy victory. In the event that any of the disparate anarchist groups tries to band together in a spirit of cooperation or defense against a common adversary, passive-aggressive tribalistic infighting will eat up a critical mass of their resources!
*
Now, let's get back to reality and realize there is no such conspiracy to derail anarchism.
Still: mission accomplished, no?
Edit: wording. Also-- I'm only critiquing the concept of anarchism implicitly espoused by the authors. The anarchists of the early 20th century seemed to have suffered from a much different problem, which was the inability to manufacture enough arms-- to ward off both the fascists and the communists when they retook Barcelona, for example.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
[+] [-] fiatjaf|8 years ago|reply
People paste that quote everywhere, as if Churchill or whoever said that was some sage with infinite wisdom.
[+] [-] lumberjack|8 years ago|reply
Seems like it.
[+] [-] uiri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootw0rm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|8 years ago|reply
As a Punk Rock Kid I had Anarchist showing up at shows trying to get people to join the movement. Then all the way through the 90s it go crazier. I can;t tell how obnoxious and violent things got. Now 20 years later they are all Libertarians now. It is safe to say I am not a anarchist nor libertarian but I am amazed how many people fail to see the history of anarchy and libertarian thought.
Anarchy falls into self-serving narcissism.
[+] [-] rootw0rm|8 years ago|reply
So yes, of course real anarchists identify as libertarians, anarchism is the embodiment of libertarian philosophy, especially the non-aggression principal. (NAP)