Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You by David Graeber (2000)
theanarchistlibrary.org
theanarchistlibrary.org
I find this definition interesting because it seems to me there’s a very prevalent portrayal in media pointing towards the opposite, that is that humans left alone (read, without some powerful/wealthy authority) will unravel into the most depraved state imaginable.
Reading the book factuality was fascinating because it showed me a view of humans that you don’t see in mass media since ordinary is boring and thus we only get either extremes of good or bad (read, saving the Amazon rainforest to a mother killing her child)
Anarchy by this definition is hard to believe (although I aim to) because we are bombarder with the exceptions to the rule
The pastoral idyll, the hunter gatherers, etc. Once you get high density, anonymity, etc. that comes with towns and cities it probably breaks down quite a bit and you need a force to keep it from imploding.
People might think the British were not brutal with their own people, but if you read up on the Clearances, you’d know they valued people less than sheep.
Don't fool yourself! The niceties of modern times require a critic mass that is orders of magnitude larger than what anarchism can cope with.
What we are talking here is a community of adult people.
Hunter gatherers don't really universally not have hierarchical societies. Both explicit and implicit.
Anarchy, or anarchism?
In my private lexicon, "anarchy" is simply a state of social disorder. "Anarchism" on the other hand, is any of a number of political views that reject hierarchy, violence and masters (so anarcho-capitalism is capitalism, not anarchism). The maintenance of order in a society without using hierarchies or violence ironically requires a lot of organisation and "rules".
People have to opt-in to those rules, at least in the sense that you can live with them for now. Yes, there will always be people who reject all rules, and refuse to cooperate with others. They get shunned, which sounds awful; but nearly all anarchist societies are embedded in some hierarchical state, so opting out isn't that awful.
I have trouble imagining an anarchist society that encompasses an entire state or territory. I'm told that Iraqi Kurds have established something like that, but I have no experience of it, and don't know how it works. I've only known anarchism working in relatively small groups, with a surrounding non-anarchist society to absorb and deal with the opt-outs.
That's not surprising as the media, speaking generally, is a class which aligns itself closely with the ruling class and is incentivized to maintain the status quo.
I'm thinking that the problem is audience bias. Outside of a few little niches, running "All Is Well in Happy Valley"-type stories does not pay the bills.
I don't have a copy of today's NYT so I'll leave it to someone else to perform the exercise. But it's besides the point. You're asking the wrong question. Again speaking generally, when the media criticizes the "incompetence & evils of governments" it is in effort to elevate or promote some other government party, or to promote their alternative program or policy, not to fundamentally alter the system of government itself. When they criticize a member of the ruling class it frequently is part of a coordinated PR campaign organized by another member of the ruling class.
Anyone part of the media who veers too off course the path of allowable opinion is quickly reigned in or let go.
The system (democracy for example) is good, it's bad people doing it wrong.
or
The system is bad, it attracts, and it will always attract psychopaths.
Media are using only the first approach and almost never the second.
I live in a capital of a small chicken-shaped european country, where we have a couple of intersections where basically all life stops during rush hour. As soon as the light turns green, people rush into an already full intersections, honk at people alreday stuck there, then wave angrily at the next batch of people honking at them, when the lights change and noone has moved a bit.
Then one day, our rich and corrupt mayor had to pass there, and had to exit his car to wave at people and yell at bus drivers (city employees) stuck there too.
So, the next day (and a few weeks after), police was patrolling that intersection, literally stopping cars from entering a blocked intersection (even if their light was green), and driving there was finally managable, if you drove into a non-clogged direction, you could actually drive through. A few weeks later, no police anymore, chaos is back.
Same for parking... city streets and city police (actually two branches that can give out fines), you get fined within five minutes of parking where you shouldn't or parking and not paying. Hofer (=Aldi) parking, where noone enforces parking: https://old.reddit.com/r/Slovenia/comments/188zh49/malo_de%C... (no, these are not parking spots, but it was raining a bit, and some drivers think they'll melt if water touches them).
So yeah... a human can behave nice, people as a group? Nope.
When you get off that diet and start interacting with people more in real life and use "boring" time as an opportunity to try new things (again in real life, offline), it feels good. Like eating fresh veggies after subsisting on fast food for so long you forgot what real food tastes like.
I'm kinda preaching this to myself since I grew up on all that stuff and am trying to maintain the awareness of this different perspective in order to improve my own mindset (I was tempted to say productivity, but raw output isn't the goal so much as using that "boredom" feeling as a trigger for exploration).
e.g. if you read anything on your local cities subreddit you will think everyone in the city is left leaning. You will think that anyone who isn't left leaning is the devil; they are pedophiles, conspiracy theorists, etc.
If you go out into the city 99.9% of the people are perfectly pleasant regardless of their political leanings.
Put a group of mentally stable people together in a safe, hospitable community with unlimited resources and yes the theory will probably hold true.
But what happens when the food runs out? If there's a natural disaster? A plague? Some other crisis? What if they get invaded by a neighboring tribe whose intentions aren't so great?
That's the true test of anarchy, and humans have shown throughout history that they soundly fail it.
Evolution is not a dinner party, to misquote a certain Chinese guy.
Its corporations and billionaires and dictators being able to mobilize massive amounts of wealth and/or people that lead to terrible outcomes. So anarchists are completely correct: their tenets reduced to the simple slogan of 'no gods, no masters' is the only fundamentally correct ideology.
And yes, even in COVID times people banded together across countries to help each other.
Btw anarchy is quite new. You may learn from eg Zapatistas or Rojave but these are anarchy adjacent
The socialist (leftwing anarchism adjacent), mustache-jesus ("apo") stuff is far more revered in the military and certain communes.
All anarchism stems from voluntary interactions, which depends on free trade .
And no, capitalism is not the same as voluntary interactions or free trade, no matter what people keep trying to claim.
Or just maybe leave me alone and agree to trade capital voluntarily. All options.
For example, I gladly would give money to fund infrastructure in my neighbourhood, I help my friends, family, my neighbourhood both financially and with time, etc. I enjoy helping out those in genuine need.
When that becomes taxation and when I end up being forced under the threat of violence to fund all sorts of stuff that I don't feel I (or anyone) should be paying for, my behaviour changes, because it no longer makes me feel good to do so.
So I end up minimizing my taxes due, earning less via income, trying to avoid paying for things like parking etc etc because it doesn't feel like a fair and equal trade.
A lot of people feel this way.
Around 1% of people are responsible for 63% of all violent crime convictions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24173408/
So the vast majority of people are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. But a tiny minority of people, even in a world where we try to force "reasonable behavior," cause an unfathomable amount of suffering and destruction. If we completely give up on the idea of "forcing people to behave," you have to have a good answer about what exactly these people do in that world, and what exactly happens as a result.
My definition has always been that we can have laws, we can have rules, we definitely need rules, but everyone must have a chance to understand how they're made, and everyone must have a chance to be part of the process. The only true democracy is anarchy. If we can put a man on the moon and hold elections then surely we can construct a functional anarchist system.
If you're a true anarchist you believe more in rules than anyone else. Rules about littering, about right of way, rules that enforce order. Because without centralized leadership everyone must help enforce the rules.
Which is also why it'll never work in practice of course. It will always remain a dream, it goes against evolution, really. If evolution is throwing dice then it dictates that sooner or later someone will go against the grain. No system is perfect and sooner or later someone will exploit it.
The true nature of human politics is just pure chaos. Dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, or like Pac said; "gimme gimme gimme, everybody back off". It's like a biological survival instinct to hoard wealth and protect ones own against the world.
This is an empirical question. It seems to me that even if a good-sized majority of the population is capable of living in this fashion, a small minority is absolutely not. (And this obviously is not due to "deprivation" or "inequality", unless you believe that white collar criminals are "deprived.") A small percentage of people can quite easily ruin things for everyone else, e.g. in NYC where a third of all shoplifting arrests were for 327 people (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...).
The real test is:
Your friend’s daughter had her drink spiked and then was raped while passed out by a bunch of frat guys.
If you believe that you and your buddies should get together with guns and baseball bats and go to the Frat house and exact justice/revenge on them, then you might really be an anarchist.
All the situations outlined are nice and good. Self-organization should be the default mode. However, there are situations where you need someone that can use violence to enforce justice. For most people, that would be the state.
Do you believe that the state should be trying to enforce justice for rape, or do you think it should be the responsibility of a “self-organizing” posse?
If we agree that it is the state’s responsibility, then we can talk about ways to improve it. But then, you are already not an anarchist.
The problematic parts come up with how you pay the judge (stealing from 3rd parties), jailers etc and much the other stuff the state does. It would probably be more pragmatic to basically privatize the judge/court.
So again, think of murder instead of rape. The victim isn't going to enforce a right to justice - they already failed to do so. Now what? Do you just shrug and say "you should have defended yourself better"? In that environment, can you not see how much it would absolutely suck to be a loner who is both physically and financially weak?
Worse: Can you not see that you are in fact physically, financially, and socially weak? You're going to be the prey. So think very carefully before you advocate this "utopia".
While I acknowledge the difficulties in justice with murder you're just arguing over which group of buddies is the bestest, and picking the biggest murderer of them all. Not seeing any improvement.
Now, who do you think should deal with it, your buddies or the state?
Well, I guess I'm not an anarchist then because I think it's already difficult when there's pressure to tell people what to do.
I do wish I'd agree with that though.
When it’s reported to be a political film, it may be specifically anarchist, very interesting
> Now, you might object that all this is well and good as a way for small groups of people to get on with each other, but managing a city, or a country, is an entirely different matter. And of course there is something to this. Even if you decentralize society and put as much power as possible in the hands of small communities, there will still be plenty of things that need to be coordinated, from running railroads to deciding on directions for medical research. But just because something is complicated does not mean there is no way to do it democratically. It would just be complicated. In fact, anarchists have all sorts of different ideas and visions about how a complex society might manage itself. To explain them though would go far beyond the scope of a little introductory text like this. Suffice it to say, first of all, that a lot of people have spent a lot of time coming up with models for how a really democratic, healthy society might work; but second, and just as importantly, no anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.
...and comparing it to Wikipedia's take...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy
...I'm thinking that the article is actually advocating for an idyllic version of small-government democracy. Not anarchy.
Small-scale, if well-behaved people are the vast majority, and there are easy ways to cut out the occasional bad actor - that can work very well. Just look at the Internet of the 1970's and 1980's.
Larger scale, with a real-world mix of human behaviors, and cutting off the "wrong sort" far more difficult - OOPS. Look at the modern internet, and the many toxic actors and organizations that have explosively grown in the large-scale anarchy.
EDIT: Add "no big rewards for becoming dominant" to my preconditions for anarchy working well. You for-sure could not have gotten Zuckerbucks-grade rich by dominating the early internet.
I guess that does kind of make sense though. We also don't use the left/right spectrum the way most other cultures do and we've totally redefined what it means to be liberal or conservative.
Well looky there, I must be an anarchist too?
In USA these terms were co-opted by right wing to come up with anarchocapitalism and right-libertarianism.
If you ask a fan of AOC (not all of them obviously), "socialism" might conjure an image of clean and tidy Stockholm, ask a fan of Trump (not all of them obviously) and they'll tell you about Stalin's gulags or how Sweden is overrun by "Muslim terrorist".
That's a crock of shit, look at how brutal early civilizations were compared to today. You have an argument over long terms (100+ year spans), but not in the near term.
If you want the assumption to apply to the near term, you have to accept that people behave in part based on the laws and society which they grew up with, which then makes you look weird for being against that system. That's what gives rise to the common decency.
That's why I suppose anarchism as an ideology was born in the 19th century. You don't have to make it work through all of humankind history, just in the modern times. I say this and I'm not even an anarchist myself.
Counterexample: Pirates had a fairly anarchic organization - certainly more anarchic than most ships. They were still pretty good at killing people.
Perhaps you have confused anarchism with a "state of nature"? An anarchist society needs a lot of organisation.
If north america went anarcho-capitalist, it'd work as well as or better the current system.
But the problem is that there's still an entity which must enforce property rights, etc. This 'police/military force' then becomes the new government. It will ever increase in size. Eventually you arrive back to where we are.
Where government got so large that it's unsustainable, suddenly anarchist sentiments return.
An anarchist state is also kind of an oxymoron.
Reaction II: Well...Japan often is an extremely poor fit for Western conceptual pigeonholes...
If so, then you may be an anarchist.
> I’ve been working with people who’ve become big advocates for a universal basic income. It’s not the only solution, but it conforms with my political instincts. People think that is odd because I’m an anarchist. Why would I want a policy where the government would just give people money? Isn’t that giving power to the government? I say, no.
> A basic income would be the perfect leftist antibureaucratic policy. It would not only reduce the number of bureaucrats, but it would get rid of the worst of them, the annoying ones who decide whether you’re really poor enough to deserve this, or whether you’re really married to that person or whether you really live in that room.
He thought there were multiple ways people considered themselves on the left. For example, from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/from-managerial-feudalism-... :
> The conclusion that I came to is that essentially, the left is applying an outdated paradigm: they’re still thinking in terms of bosses and workers in a kind of old-fashioned industrial sense, when what’s really going on is that for most people the key class opposition is caregivers versus managers. Leftist parties are trying to represent both sides at the same time, but they’re really dominated by the latter.
and that "mainstream left" wasn't barely on the left. From https://davidgraeber.org/interviews/i-found-myself-turning-i... :
> Because, in a way, the left began against bureaucratization of life. It’s about freedom. The mainstream left, which is barely left at all at this point in traditional terms … has really embraced a combination of market and bureaucracy, an equal synthesis of the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of bureaucracy.
I don't think "leftism" is really an ideology, or at least it can mean very different things in different contexts.
Edit: I find it also better to use "liberalist" instead of "liberal" when referring to the political movement and ideology. "Liberal" is easy to misinterpret and misuse, and it tends to hide the fact that liberalism a quite specific ideology, that e.g. has no monopoly on liberty.
He's an authoritarian autocrat. I've never come across a definition of "liberal" that includes that.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/friedrich-hayek-dictatorshi...
No, because I find that extremely reductionist, simplistic and naive. In my experience points of view that abandon nuance in favor of equivocation and cynicism tend themselves to be attempts at propaganda and control.
It is true, if you adopt the left/right political model (which you don't even need to, it is itself a propaganda tool meant to normalize the two party paradigm in American politics) that both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US serve the needs of capitalism and the military industrial complex. It is not, however, true that all leftist ideology and all right-wing ideology are essentially the same as a result, and that neither have any purpose or value beyond simply being vehicles for capitalism.
"Far-left" is a derogatory term, a synonym for "left-wing extremist". Nobody considers themselves an extremist. I've noticed that my own views seem to be to the left of any mainstream political party here. For me, that just means that all the mainstream parties are right-wing.
I reserve the term "far-left" for hyper-dogmatic communist revolutionaries who don't object to using violence for political ends.
I don't agree that all Marxist-Leninists are authoritarian; and for what it's worth, I'm not aware of any Marxist-Leninist grassroots group operating here (UK).
I repeat: "far-left" is a term of abuse. It's routinely deployed by US persons of the Trumpian and Tea-Party persuasions against anyone they disagree with, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, a party that has never espoused any kind of socialism.