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Yes, anarchists think that the right set of social processes can allow for organizations that don't have abusive hierarchies. But these processes themselves are very structured and take a lot of careful work.

This is so far from popular understanding of anarchism.

There was an interesting story someone wrote about their time with some anarchists who traveled to New Orleans to help in the wake of the hurricane to help. The had a house and kitchen and in addition to traveling around and helping on an individual basis they planned to provide free meals to the locals.

They ran into the problem where one group of volunteers that aligned to cook together were vegan and insisted on making only vegan food (it also sounded like the dishes were very strange to the locals). This made sense for the cooks, but the locals didn't want the food. But nobody could convince this group to do anything differently.

Their system resulted in a sort of rotating hierarchy that meant every few days they couldn't provide for the locals.

Functional anarchy seems like it takes a lot of work.

Imagine being homeless from a hurricane yet still so privileged you can turn your nose up at a free vegan meal! Guess they didn't really need the meal after all...

I feel like this is more a commentary on the "needy" folks.

No one goes into a soup kitchen and expects to get their favorite meal, but I guess these folks were expecting the vegans to give up their beliefs and cook them hamburgers.

The people who they were helping weren't starving on the streets, I don't know what you imagine the aftermath of in New Orleans was like, but it wasn't that.

There's a strange cruelty to your comment where you're thinking of homeless people who went through a natural disaster ... so you can call them 'privileged'.

I'm not trying to be cruel, but rather point out perhaps these community meals weren't that valuable if locals just turned their noses up at the free food. When folks are really hungry, it wouldn't matter if lentils isn't their normal cuisine, they'd eat it anyway and be grateful. It would be a different story if the meals violated some religious taboo, but the way you wrote it really makes the survivors sound ungrateful.

People in this country, across class lines, are addicted to their likes/dislikes being catered to, particularly in challenging times.

The issue is deeply cultural & until it's being worked on, solidarity is key: serving people in the ways they choose to receive care.

People generally don't like having their immediate needs exploited by those seeking to proselytize an ideology. I'm not sure that's an "issue" that needs to be "worked on". If you're being altruistic and want to help people in need, the help you're offering is about them, not you -- if you make it about you, why would you be surprised when people doubt your intentions?

Imagine if the local library were destroyed, and a group came forward to organize book donations, but due to the religious beliefs of the people running the book drive, they only were willing to collect evangelical literature, and refused everything else. Would the locals in that scenario be wrong to avoid them?

Precisely what I meant when I wrote "solidarity is key: serving people in the ways they choose to receive care"

At a men's shelter I have seen the guys trash and refuse the carrots because they were purple. I think on some level a dignity thing kicks in. Like I will take the charity but I'm not going to let you treat me like a lesser person because of it. I tried explaining that the purple carrots were actually fancier but they weren't having it.

I think folks in desperate situations .... could use the gift of allowing them some dignity / choices. If you're in a bad spot your choices are so limited.

Don't want to go too far down the religious hole considering where some folks have taken religion, but the whole story of Jesus washing people's feet wasn't just about his own humility / setting an example. I think it was also about treating others with some respect.

Or they could have just gotten over themselves and served them what they wanted.

Things breaking down over veganism sounds like the typical anarchist self-own.

I think it's quite likely that the locals legitimately were just not that desperate for food in this specific neck of the woods, which would simply mean that, unfortunately, well-intentioned efforts to help with that were misallocated.

But if they really were short of food: I'll side with smug vegans over choosing beggars.

If you're cooking for other people, shouldn't it be the kind of food they want to eat? Otherwise, who are you cooking for, your principles?

Well... if someone requested I cook them BSE-infected meat when there's perfectly good non-infected meat to have, I think (hope!) most people would offer to cook the non-infected meat instead, even if it's not "the kind of food they wanted to eat". Why? Because it's ridiculous to demand BSE-infected meat, at least to someone who knows of the potential health effects.

Some people draw that line elsewhere. I could picture someone else saying "it's ridiculous to demand meat, at least to someone who knows of the environmental and financial consequences, when perfectly good food exists that does not have the same consequences." That's putting the line elsewhere, but it's just the same line.

It's not about cooking for one's principles, it's about respecting them while offering to cook for someone else.

I'd argue that Overton's Window has a place in the context for where one tries to place that line.

FDA approval of food is far more respected in our culture than Vegan approval of food is at the current time, and food means a lot more to a dining experience than just filling up a nutritional fuel tank.

In a hurricane you are eating so you don't starve. While there are reasonable limits to what you can serve before you should stop serving anything at all, most vegan food is far from unreasonable.

In emergency situation you don’t always have the time to gather people preferences and do the shopping. Often the vegan diet match the most restrictions and is super cheap if cooked with raw ingredients like lentils. I can’t help thinking to the "eat together" movement that do one step further and integrate Jainism : https://www.dietethics.eu/en/home.php

>I guess these folks were expecting the vegans to give up their beliefs and cook them hamburgers

They expected food that looks like a food and does not come across as disgusting to them. They did not expected hamburgers, they expected simple cheap foods that wont stress them out further.

They have choosen to go more hungry for that day.

if you've worked at soup kitchen, which your comment indicates you have not, you would know that serving people what they want to eat is the dignified way to give people food.

It was thirty years ago. I wasn't the one choosing what to cook. I just poured out bowls of soup. I didn't realize these days soup kitchens take orders! We surely do have a remarkable abundance of food in this country that even those without can choose what they want to be given from charity.

Funny. Anarachism, like every other political philosophy, is not an antidote to stupidity.

That said, it is easy to think that some other decision making mechanism (besides the rotating decision makers these guys were practicing) would always lead to better outcomes. A common consensus mechanism is decision by majority voting. Which often works, but often just picks the suboptimal solution, because it the average of the actual close to optimal solutions different subgroups are advocating for.

Every decision making mechanisms has some failures (and advantages). It's good to know what they are.

Even if just putting someone in charge of collecting some data that might say "looks like we feed more people with PPJ sandwiches than X,Y,Z, let's mix that into the rotation a bit more". Could even satisfy all parties.

Unfortunately there's an underlying "i do what I want" in a lot of political philosophies where it just doesn't work that way, even for getting what they want..

> Which often works, but often just picks the suboptimal solution, because it the average of the actual close to optimal solutions different subgroups are advocating for.

It's called a compromise, and it's fairly critical to a functioning group of humans of literally any size.

| Anarachism, like every other political philosophy, is not an antidote to stupidity.

Not necessarily picking on your comment in particular, but it does remind me of several (what I considered at the time) broken software development methodologies that I've encountered.

Someone tells me their philosophy of development, I point out what I feel is a problematic edge case, they respond with something like the above: "well you still have to use your brain".

It seems to me that everyone's real philosophy is just being sufficiently smart and the "formal" definition is really just brought out for story time.

Anarchism's name has been smeared so much no one agrees on what it means any more. It simply is the rejection of any form of coercion, especially from the State with its laws and monopoly on violence. It does not care at all about how people organise themselves.

The ideological hate for any form of hierarchy and structure is not anarchism, it's chaos.

I have my suspicions that people organizing themselves at scale leads to the State. It happened historically.

It also not happened historically. The nation states we have today do happen historically (obviously), but they seem to be a rare phenomenon.

What you’re describing sounds a lot like syndicalism, which is an idea that many people interested in structure without hierarchy end up at! Including Noam Chomsky[0], who is perhaps better known here for his hierarchy (lol) of grammars.

[0] https://chomsky.info/19760725/

It seems that those ideas are mainly optimizing for making sure that the group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary, or what she calls "democratic structuring" in the essay.

If one wants a default, well-tested structure, hierarchy seems to be a good candidate[1]. Another idea is to optimize for viability, meaning the ability to adapt to and survive changes in the environment, described by the Viable System Model[2].

I wonder if there are studies on the different ways of structuring and their goals and tradeoffs.

[1] Choose Boring Culture — https://charity.wtf/2023/05/01/choose-boring-technology-cult...

[2] Tools for Viable Organizing — https://vsru.org/articles/tools-for-viable-organizing.html

"Heirarchy" describes a set of power and/or decision-making and/or accountability relationships.

It does not describe how the individuals who hold particular positions within the heirachy may change over time, which is a central part of the ideas Joreen gets to in the latter part of the essay.

Or in click-bait terms: you can have heirarchy without heirarchy :)

A traditional hierarchy is a tree, whereas a flat governance aims to be as close as possible to a connected graph. It's significantly easier to maintain a tree than a connected graph, especially with a sufficient group size. You're unlikely to find many people willing to invest so much effort into maintaining a flat organization, and even if you do, often times it's a better investment for those people to be actively making progress on that shared goal rather than governance.

IMO, a regular representative democracy is "good enough." It may be biased towards the elite, but it's still by far the most successful form of governance when it comes to creating large systemic change. The perceived ineffectiveness of it comes from people's unwillingness to put actual work, which applies to any other form of organization as well.

No, it's not. It heavily favors the elite to the point it ended up like it is today all over the world - halfway to plutocracy with a touch of oligarchy.

What people consider oligarchy is actually allowing the outsourcing of governance to the elite. Corporations are disproportionately represented because they are the ones who do the most research and strategizing. The high profile victories of the post WWII era (e.g. Civil Rights, the Clean Air Act, OSHA) were achieved by grassroots groups dedicating themselves to similar levels of effort. On the other hand, modern day advocacy and political engagement prioritizes entertainment and memeyness. Even today, people achieve victories over the elite when they take civic engagement seriously like NIMBYs blocking billionaire developers.

“Teams selecting leaders” or “randomly choosing the spokesperson” still gives rise to an explicit hierarchy, but in this case it’s not permanent and there’s a mechanism that prevents it from becoming permanent.

The idea that you can avoid hierarchy is, I think, confusing “social hierarchies with permanent places” - yes, bad, avoid that - with the _concept_ of hierarchy at all.

Yes, it's the time of year (olympiad?) when we remind ourselves that elections push power upward, then the elected push it downward.

Thanks for surfacing her ideas.

Although I have to admit that these sound all like ideas that sound great "in theory" but don’t work in reality. At least I’m not aware of good examples.

Oh, I dunno- my experience is that in "reality" almost every group of folks I have worked with, from software teams to stage hands to bands has (when functioning well) been more or less organized around those kinds of ideas.

It may sound hyperbolic to say that "anarchism is the default way humans work together". At the same every production I have worked in may have a boss, but at the same time usually the folks actually doing the work are getting along with very little direct hierarchy- people who know what to do go do it, folks who don't get tasked with doing things.

Most folks have watched stuff really get into the weeds when every action needs to be dictated from above.

It is common in universities in at least some parts of the world for the dean(s) of departments to rotate among the faculty.

That seems to align somewhat with those ideas.

Teams selecting someone to speak for them is voters selecting a representative. Different representatives for different committees isn't unusual. A rotating representative is similar to a rotating president or sortition.

The basics of representative democracy with different words.

> Leaders do not select their teams, instead, teams select their spokesperson. A spokesperson does not have authority over the team but can make decisions on their behalf in conversation with other spokespeople.

I have seen this and result is that no one wants to be the spokesperson except really really aggressive people able to bully others into compliance. Because the "spokeperson" gets to experience all the negative consequences of the decisions without having the authority to do anything about it. They are effectively secretaries. Most people, including good leaders, nope out.