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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question for this audience.

Given a general recognition of the philosophical grounding of Chomsky and the broader social anarchist philosophers (Henry George comes up frequently)…

Why is there not more directed advocacy or support for leadership that present anarchist political perspectives?

My observation is that in a large percentage of cases, people have such a strong reaction to the word, “anarchist” that they can’t actually evaluate it the way that political philosophers define it

And so there is no linguistic term that is not triggering, which also reflects the broader philosophical tradition of individual agent based Interactions that are disintermediated from other power structures.

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The issue is in the discourse that's leveled against the average person. Its not scientific or data centric, its tribalistic and designed to appeal to emotion over rational logic. As you note, there are smart people who can take all the existing information about the world, read up on political theories and make their own conclusions from available evidence and data. These rationalists are not most people, unfortunately.

Others don't learn such critical thinking and research skills. These people act very much like humans have acted for a millennia, appealing to their trusted shaman or chief as the source of truth rather than a careful, individual assessment of the available evidence. They think in terms of emotion.

Then there is a third group of people who are aware of both groups of people. They use the rational people to research actionable data, and use the science of propaganda to convince the emotional masses to support whatever is useful for this third group in terms of amassing more resources, or more power to later amass more resources.

I'm not sure how we get out of this rut as a species to be honest. As the famous quote goes, you can't rationalize someone out of a perspective they didn't rationalize themselves into.

What a thoughtful response and I think that you’ve done a fantastic job at summarizing the crux of the issue

Namely, that idealized human organizational structures require every citizen to have a level of dedication and persistent scrutiny, education, etc... that would allow for sustainment of a society. This is every Greek philosopher ever saying that education is the key to democracy

Further, because this is the case, societies have tendencies (as we know from history) to lurch around following leaders who exploit this epistemological gap

I fear that you’re correct in the sense that this is not a tractable problem

Thank you!

History shows it's been overcome. It just requires dedicated work, just as it has in labor movements in the United States, and in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and the precursors to it.

But you're absolutely right, it takes work to create the environment these ideas can take hold.

You're welcome!

I think while it's tempting to suggest education will solve it, its a biological/social impossibility as well. Many people go through the same curriculum but outcomes are very different for various reasons such as underlying cognitive abilities or the presence of other external factors in your life (e.g. having to work part time to support ones self, an abusive stressful household).

This issue is probably why the founding fathers wanted to put guardrails over who is eligible to vote in effort to select for a population that is more likely to be able to interpret legal issues (white, presumably educated landowners presumably familiar with reading contracts and conducting business).

This of course runs into the typical issues around disenfranchisement, since the representative government favors voters (and especially donors as these campaigns are unfortunately donor financed) and their issues over nonvoters. Kamala Harris was just in Brentwood over the weekend with the job of soliciting donations with the wealthy democratic donor base vs. being a VPOTUS, and I find that a little bit unsavory considering we don't even need to have campaigning to have an effective government at all, in theory. It only serves to give those with money an unequal influence on the political process relative to the rest of the electorate.

>leadership that present anarchist

You might see the conflict here in the wording...

A successful meme is one that causes itself to be propagated. For example most religions have a tenant of "have kids, teach those kids your religion" and "convert others to your religion". Leadership in a group that says get rid of leadership is never going to be as successful as a group that attempts to acquire more power. Or to say different, it's success measure would be in destroying itself.

I think you're responding exactly in a way GP is talking about, namely "that they can’t actually evaluate it the way that political philosophers define it."

Anarchism does not mean that there are no leaders or leadership.

Anarchism means there is no unjustified authority.

>unjustified authority

That is a tautology. Who provides the justification and who gave them that authority. The king? The nobles? The learned? The majority? The masses? The individual?

The problem with power is it is self justifying. If you have power you can justify anything, and if you do not, you exist at the mercy of those that do. One would think the most rational behavior would be to give those power that want it least (such as anarchists), but human psychology shows that significant portions of humanity want hierarchies and will gladly give their power to put a dictator/king into power.

Noam Chomsky - "Anarchism is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times."

This is just a continuation of the tautology...

In this statement Noam manages to stick his head so far up his own ass that you can see his face inside his mouth...

> And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by

By fucking what. Oh yes, by someone/something/some group with power. If you have the power to do this, you have the same power as a brutal dictator. If you have power to tear down these non-self justifying systems, you can use any fucking justification you want to tear it down. At the end of the day power is power. You just hope this power is wielded towards more freedom, but you're just a single orator away from tyranny.

> By fucking what.

By the workers, not the owners of capital. That is justified authority.

Now pull yourself out of the 1800's and ask that question of the face of further automation and replacement of employees by 'intelligent' machines.

Workers rights are just a bullshit statement of the same classification as 'landowner rights'. Human rights should be paramount regardless if you have a job or not.

But to have these rights, you must organize and concentrate this power or you'll just be scattered by the owners of capital that have already concentrated their power highly effectively.

The topic of the article this thread is about is Anarchism in the 1900s.

I would have assumed at least your insults would have been consistent with the article.

A couple interesting points here. One is the supposition that something which is more “justified” is better. We humans do a lot of things which cannot be justified and are good, so this seems an odd position to me.

The other is that “something more free” is coupled with something “more just”, and that that is also better than something which is less justified. The implication here would be that adding more freedom is always more just than something “unjustified”. I don’t think this logically holds, either.

By this definition virtually every political system could be argued to be compatible with "anarchism". Dante justified the authority of the church. Hobbes justified the rule of the king. People all across the centre of the political spectrum - and further right from that - are happy to justify state monopoly on violence with the need to enforce rules. Justifying various kinds of authority has been the work of political philosophers for millennia.

You're asking the question "who" has to justify the authority.

In the case of governments, it's the population. Not political philosophers.

I think I'm asking what constitutes a "justification", not who.

The "population" justified the Iranian Revolution handing authority to the Ayatollah and the IRGC. Is Iran a model of the anarchic state?

Without literal Democracy, it is incorrect to argue the population justified the government. It would have to be consistent, and continual justification by decree by the population through Direct Democracy.

Is the anarchism Chomsky has in mind literally just direct democracy then?

It's not limited to governments, but in the case of governments, yes. Noam Chomsky is for democracy, and democratic institutions.

In the workplace, it's the workers who should have all of the decision making.

When you bring your kids to school, you expect the teacher to have some authority over them: to give them homework, ask them questions and stay quiet for at least part of the past. But you dont expect from the teachers corporal punishment, or religious indoctrination, etc.

I think most reasonable people would accept this line of thinking without problem.

I don't think anarchism is necessarily "get rid of leadership" - it can be more like "share leadership." In other words, to do this well, you must recognise and dismantle coercive structures and dominance. This of course takes work, but skipping over this work in favour of "output" type work has led to a great deal of output without consideration of consequences. If we learn to be leaders in a context of power-sharing, there's not necessarily a conflict in that power's expansion, though it's hard to make that legible in a world where power is regarded as a resource subject to scarcity.

it's not possible to dismantle dominance structures. They're evolutionarily defined in our biology and are primordial. If you ban explicitly stated dominance hierarchies, they merely become implicit.

Think about "flat" organizations. On paper, there is no power hierarchy. In reality, you have to join the group and observe to discover who is actually in power, because it's implicit, but there is always someone in power. This is then lamented as "politics."

There is no evidence that implicit power structures, especially ones where everyone maintains the lie that there is no power structure at all, are better than explicitly defined power structures.

In fact, history presents lots of evidence to the contrary, especially if you read Russian!

Dominance is a strategy among the ones we have evolved to employ, but it's not accurate to say it is "wired in" as the primary and inescapable strategy. At least as I understand it, anarchism does not deny our impulses to dominance exist, rather it seeks to put that tendency in check through processes of collaboration and checks to individual power.

As soon as you begin introducing an argument that is about states or organziations, it becomes a little muddy, since at least in theory, anarchism is playing a different game, but there are examples even in our current era of rampantly dominant structures of this working at scale. For example, the 12-step programs are designed in such a way that their governance works by essentially anarchist, collectivist principles, and there are millions of people participating in them.

>but it's not accurate to say it is "wired in" as the primary and inescapable strategy.

The issue is it is an effective strategy. You have to actively control it from taking over. The vast majority of the population must be inoculated against using dominance and to stamp it out, which again comes down to "who is going to teach them that and ensure these teachings don't get corrupted".

Saying that unimportant things like 12-step programs use this is pretty useless. While some individuals may have high stakes in these programs, for most people there is no stake at all. If your local chapter fails under a brutal dictator you can just go to another one. The rate of failure like this won't even be documented.

When someone says fuck your checks and balances in your government it's a different story you're in grave danger, and by watching the news now, I don't think many people are willing to do much about it at all.

> unimportant things like 12-step programs

Hundreds of millions of people have participated in programs like this.

That's a lot of people to experience first-hand how it's possible to accomplish good things through decentralization, voluntary association, lack of hierarchy, mutual aid and community-driven governance.

That doesn't seem "unimportant" to me, but perhaps it would be easier to see the effectiveness of anarchist principles at work in a different domain, such as open-source software development.

There is nothing biological about the modern corporation. It can be different, as it was in Spain.

That's the point. Identifying unjustified authority, and replacing it.

I think one has to admit the possibility that a shared leadership model is simply at a competitive disadvantage. Looking to biology, there are advantages to specialized brains and central nervous systems.

Organisms without centralization abound, but rarely in direct competition with animals. They tend to exist in separate niches and compete with each other.

"I don't think anarchism is necessarily "get rid of leadership""

No, but many anarchists simply say so. No political power for anyone. And yet there are/were many anarchists leaders. For many anarchists this is not a problem, if the leadership is voluntarily followed. For others it is a temporary solution at best. So the result is constant debates and nothing gets done. So not that surprising, why anarchism has not much mainstream appeal. It is not at all a consistent ideology. The words anarchism are anti themself - a negation of hierachy. But what is a hierachy? What is "good" leadership?

Not clear.

So some anarchistic schools of thought might have a more consistent model, of how to do things, anarcho-syndicalism seems to be one. But in the end, it gets mixed up with everything else. How can that be convincing for the masses?

Makhno's Platformism came to mind, and it was convincing enough for an armed guerrilla to:

- get rid of Germany after Lenin's betrayal

- Beat Russian loyalist, the white Army (I want to say Denikine but it could be a man with a name in -ov like Shalov), inflicting twice as Manu casualties

- kept Lenin's army (lead by Trotsky? I think, but I might have it mixed up with Kronstad) in check for years as bullets and men got rarer, until defeat.

Yes, I heard about them, but I also heard that their organisation was not at all free of hierachies, so many anarchists do not consider them anarchists.

They were people with weapons - taking what they needed for their fight. So some claim they were democratically legitimized, but the farms where they just took the horses and food from, could not really disagree - as the machnoists had the weapons. And they used it.

But most details seems to have been lost and it is hard getting accurate accounts. Those I read, were quite bloody and brutal. So all in all probably less brutal then the accounts of the white and red army, but not really up to the standards of "voluntarily" and "equality" like anarchisms wants to be.

Anarchism isn't about getting rid of leadership.

It's about asking the question if authority is justified, and if it isn't dismantling it.

Certainly there are cases where authority is justified. Just not in the case of unaccountable private dictatorships, or as they are known, corporations.

Wouldn't anarchists also be opposed to the state, and any governments above the local level, which are to be determined democratically?

No. It would be justifiable to have a government at a national level democratically controlled to handle foreign policy for example.

But it would be a real democracy, and would require consistent ratification from the population. Details on individual tactics like this depend on the technology and situation in existence.

It's getting far easier to imagine a world where this is possible.

See: Switzerland

As someone who formerly identified as a libertarian, this is the logic that made me question the position. A philosophy which when empowered aims to minimize its sphere of influence is self-defeating, unfortunately.

The name is basically irrelevant. There are other names used for it, like Libertarian Socialism. The fact it's a different name, hasn't increased the relevancy.

Libertarian Socialism and/or Anarchism, is a structure of ideas that gets destroyed by every government if it ever gains relevance, as occurred with Spain, as the article and Homage to Catalonia are about.

We don't need names to communicate the issue. It's really simple. If authority is unjustified, it should be dismantled.

And what does that mean in practice? That corporations are unaccountable privately owned Dictatorships, and workers should be in control of them.

That renting yourself to a dictatorship is not freedom, and control of operations and decision making should be in the hands of those who do the work.

Thank you for a very clear, concise statement.

With a clear conscience, I can now say "I am against that". Why?

1. Those dictatorships aren't going to dissolve themselves. You're going to have to use force to do so (I hold out very little hope of legislation against corporations passing, or being declared constitutional if it did pass). You can create an armed revolution that can overthrow corporate interests, but what you get after that doesn't usually look like greater freedom. What it looks like is someone who was after power found a vehicle to get it, and after the dust settles, all the rules and structures that limit how they can exercise power are gone.

2. It's inconsistently in favor of freedom. "Renting yourself to a dictatorship is not freedom"? What if I want to? Should I not have the freedom to do so? (Why would I want that? In terms of my overall well-being, that may look like a net win to me. I may decide that not having to worry about controlling the direction of the business, while limiting my freedom at work, means more mental space to control things I'm more interested in.)

3. It's not very practical. There are people who, bluntly, are not fit to have much of a say in how a business is run. What are you going to do with them?

If you want people to voluntarily organize into employee-owned businesses or co-ops or whatever, I'm fine with that. If you want to advocate that employees should come to such enterprises, I'm fine with that. Argue that they'll get a better (and more fulfilling) deal there? Sure. But telling the rest of us that we can't (or shouldn't) do otherwise? That sounds rather dictatorial of you, frankly. (With you not necessarily meaning AndyNemmity, but whoever advocates the idea.)

1. That isn't true of what happened in Spain, which is what the article is about.

2. There is no inconsistency. This is like asking the question should I have the freedom to be a slave.

3. The people who run the factories should make decisions about them. If an individual chooses to not make decisions within that, there's nothing wrong with that.

Most of your argument is the same for slavery, and that freedom is the ability to decide to be a slave if you wish.

2. If you define renting yourself to an employer as being slavery, then yes, it's like that. If you don't define it that way, then it's not like that at all.

So far, you have defined it that way, but given no reason why I should. For that matter, in your first post, you said, "workers should be in control of them [companies]", with no justification for that "should", either.

And the same with your reply, the parent to this comment. You give nothing but a "should" with no justification in 3, either.

You gave a very concise statement, with not a lot of argument. I get that; I even value it. But when you want to convert the not-yet-believers, you need to do better than a bunch of dogmatic "shoulds" and "that's like slavery".

I have no interest in converting anyone. I am answering questions as accurately as I can, as I always do.

I don't quite follow your disagreement, but I appreciate the way you talk. I don't mean I disagree with you, I don't quite understand what you're getting at.

I said that this

> It's inconsistently in favor of freedom. "Renting yourself to a dictatorship is not freedom"? What if I want to? Should I not have the freedom to do so?

Works as well for Slavery. And it does. What if someone wants to be a slave? Should they not have the freedom to do so?

I feel like that's a reasonable argument, and don't see any reason to adjust it.

I see. With that understanding, yes, the form of the statement is the same.

The difference, to me, is that I can see how renting myself to a corporation (yes, it's a dictatorship) can result in more net freedom for me on the axes I care more about, but I cannot imagine the same being true of slavery. So, yes, the form of the statement can be the same, but the underlying reality seems to me to be quite different. (People by the millions voluntarily left the family farm to go work for a corporation, but at least in modern times, nobody voluntarily enters slavery.)

So, yes, "complete freedom means that I should be free to do X" may be logically true for all values of X (or at least those that don't impinge on someone else's freedom). But as a practical argument rather than a purely logical one, people only care about acting in ways that they view as increasing their well-being. Some actually view working for a corporation as doing so; nobody views slavery that way. So some of us care about the freedom to work for a corporation. Saying that we should not have the freedom to do so feels restrictive in a way that is different from saying the same about slavery.

That's a fair argument that is well reasoned.

Where I disagree is the idea that working for a Boss is as fulfilling as you indicate.

It may very well be true for you, but for the rest of the population, we'd prefer not to have one.

We'd prefer not to have 1 human being able to make any decision they want, while making more than all of us combined.

I never said working for a boss was fulfilling.

I said that working for a boss may be, for example, more financially secure than working for a coop or employee-owned business or starting my own business. I may value that financial security more than I value the fulfillment of not being under a boss.

Not having a boss is good. But there's more than one thing that's good, and I may value other ones more highly.

IMO the fundamental difficulty is that anarchism is framed in terms of a negative - the absence of hierarchy. This makes it a fantastic foundation for critiquing existing (power) structures on their own merits in isolation. But that foundation makes proposing new structures a secondary concern. So then you get the various schools, each trying to describe how they themselves think society should be positively structured, while awkwardly trying to avoid the fact they're proposing new structure, and all the ways that can (and likely will) go wrong.

The problem gets especially poignant when trying to push existing society in one of these specific directions, where undermining some power structures can cause others to fill the vacuum. You'll also find yourself in opposition to other groups pushing for their own freedom, but focused on a different part of the existing power structure that makes the most sense for them to start with.

My own synthesis is something along the lines of anarchism without adjectives where we need to be against immediate oppression of individuals by power structures, but also realizing that scaling any such movements will inevitably spawn their own oppressive hierarchies, likely aimed at people different than us. Ultimately I think the larger societal changes in individual freedom are created by new technologies, each of which can either support or oppress individual freedom.

There are lots of different flavors of anarchy, and anarchists can't agree on them. Or--and I think this might be quoting or paraphrasing someone: there are as many different kinds of anarchy as there are anarchists. And sometimes their reactions to each other are very strongly negative, like "That's not really anarchy, that's just preserving capitalism via a last-ditch attempt!"

Also I think in the US at least, religion plays into it. God over humanity is conceptually the ultimate hierarchy model that Christians buy into. So it seems like Christians often don't have as much issue with embracing the idea of one person being over another person as a reflection of that model. This seems a little bit funny given how anarchic Jesus was, but he never said, "Yo, check it out, I am literally an anarchist and you should be too," and so they seem to have missed that.

Matthew 28:18-20 'Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”'

Doesn't sound anarchist to me.

Why do you say Jesus was anarchic?

> Why do you say Jesus was anarchic?

At a guess, I'd say it's because Jesus spends a lot of time casting the religious authorities as villains, so this viewpoint is extended to a general belief in antiauthority and consequently pro-anarchy. Except this also misses all the times where he turns around saying "follow the law" and other events where he criticizes antiauthoritism (e.g., his rebuke of Simon Peter during his arrest).

You have to understand Jesus historically as an apocalyptic Jew, concerned with the coming Kingdom of God replacing the corrupt world order. But it was also a restoration of the Kingdom of Israel with a descendant of David as king. That was the meaning of the Jewish messiah. Which is why Pilate had him crucified, and there was a sign saying "King of the Jews".

> This seems a little bit funny given how anarchic Jesus was

Jesus was actually pretty hierarchical. There were the masses, then the 72, then the 12, then Peter, James, and John, and then Peter.

In the capable of the talents, he has the talent taken away from the guy with 1 talent and given to the guy with 10.

Yes, you are to use your place in the hierarchy to serve those below you, but there is a hierarchy.

Takes more than philosophical grounding to accrue political power. Liberalism has fundamental contradictions that Communism or Fascism dosen't, yet it is the former that is the dominant ideology today.

Same with thing with "capitalism" or the greater financial system, most would have negative reaction to such words, yet they are one of the few systems where their ideas are fully realized in praxis onto reality.

Syndicalist

great comment, and i think, the correct answer to the Q of a non-triggering term to use for action-oriented radicalism.

also love that your account was seemingly created to add this comment.

Syndicalist is a particular style, based around Syndicalism. There's nothing inherent that is required, it's just a type.

It’s a non triggering term that Chomsky himself uses to characterize his anarchism.

I've never heard him call himself an Anarcho Syndicalist. He is certainly a supporter of Anarcho Syndicalism, but has never been a member.

The most common term I've heard him describe himself as is Libertarian Socialist, or Anarchist.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I am fairly confident. Do you have a quote to reference?

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