Comment by emt02 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emt02 | Hacker News Reader

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> Yes, it does. Who/what else is going to prevent people from trading for a profit?

There are several social and economical theories that consider a central government, and thus the state, unnecessary. Historically the anarchism movement is maybe the most known, but recently other schools of thoughts are getting relatively important, such as communalism and democratic confederalism (mostly relevant in the context of the revolution in northern Syria).

Even communism in its final form (i.e. past the dictatorship of proletariat transitioning phase) should be a stateless and classless society, however historically "communist" states failed to get past this transitioning phase (due to a refusal to give up power by the State, I guess) and ended up in a State Capitalism system, as in the USSR and in China.

However, to be honest I don't know this topic in detail enough to teach anyone, so I can only suggest you to look for more info in case you're interested.

Those ideas have been around a long time, and no such society has ever managed to be constructed, either voluntarily or forcibly. I'm pretty sure they are completely unworkable. It's like expecting people to not have sex.

"It's like expecting people to not have sex."

Thats easy, with a bit of surgery ...

I guess you're talking about the oldest of those ideas, namely anarchism and communism.

Regarding anarchism, it's known that the reason it didn't work out in the attempts so far has not been an inherent flaw in the system, but external ingerence.

In the two cases that are most known to the public, i.e. anarchist Catalogna and Free territories of Ukraine, the reason why the revolution finally failed has been in both cases the intervention of Soviet Russia, that in the first case supported an antagonist faction (i.e. communists front in the Spanish Civil War) and in the second case it invaded the free territories.

I think in general it's not possible to disregard some ideologies on the basis that they never managed to be implemented, without looking at the context. In today's world, which is dominated by capital, it would be even harder to establish a non-capitalist society, but that doesn't mean that such a society would be less fair, free or just than capitalism.

You want to avoid making the mistake of communism - ignoring what's the natural evolution of the system made of humans. Hierarchical government seems to be exactly that, as are e.g. property rights. These don't come from ideologies, but how humans self-assemble to coordinate at scale.

Even if it were true (and personally I'm not sure of that) that humans naturally tend to form hierarchical structures of power, that's not a good reason not to try to overcome this "natural" condition to create a more just society.

And I'm not sure if it's worth trying to overcome it.

Two reasons why hierarchical structures show up:

1. If you want to even have someone looking at the "big picture", due to limits of human cognition, you have to build a hierarchy.

2. Hierarchy shows up as a natural solution to coordination problems. Consider e.g. various forms of the tragedy of commons. The solution to that[0] is that all actors involved agree to be governed by an independent one. This is something that humans end up rediscovering all the time.

Basically, hierarchical governance is what lets humanity build societies larger than couple dozen people.

--

[0] - in larger systems, i.e. beyond few people who know each other personally and can mutually agree not to be assholes to one another; we have a strongly developed social skills to handle such issues in small groups.

I think you made some good points, but what I would like to point out is that, even if hierarchy was completely inevitable in some context, we should still struggle to get a just kind of hiearchy.

(A part of) the world already did some good progress on this front with the gradual switch from absolute monarchies to democracies, and I hope it will eventually be able to continue on the path towards a more just world.

That I can agree with. I mean, hierarchy solves problems, therefore is useful. Having a fair world for everyone is a goal, so adjusting hierarchies to help reach that goal is something we should work on.

Put another way, humans develop hierarchical governance as soon as their group grows beyond a couple dozen. Even if you look at corporations, internally they're structured like governments.

Most corporations are structured like ultra-authoritarian dictatorships. I'm not sure you want to use them as examplars of human governance.

Why not? They're perfect examples of efficient governance. We don't like to have that efficient governments, because in politics-land, this often involves bloodshed and suffering.

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