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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
That's the point. Identifying unjustified authority, and replacing it.
Organisms without centralization abound, but rarely in direct competition with animals. They tend to exist in separate niches and compete with each other.
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?
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Anarchism does not mean that there are no leaders or leadership.
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.
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 the workers, not the owners of capital. That is justified authority.
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.
I would have assumed at least your insults would have been consistent with the article.
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.
In the case of governments, it's the population. Not political philosophers.
The "population" justified the Iranian Revolution handing authority to the Ayatollah and the IRGC. Is Iran a model of the anarchic state?
In the workplace, it's the workers who should have all of the decision making.
I think most reasonable people would accept this line of thinking without problem.