> Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II.
This line from the article seems to misrepresent Orwell. Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve read Homage to Catalonia, but I’m pretty sure he arrived in Spain without any grand ideas of being part of a revolution, and quite simply wanted to fight against fascists. He makes it clear in his book that he initially had little understanding of the differences in ideology among the various left-wing groups, and chose to join the anarchists rather arbitrarily.
"I’m pretty sure he arrived in Spain without any grand ideas of being part of a revolution, and quite simply wanted to fight against fascists."
He was a socialist before going to spain, but his idea was to go there as a journalist. But once there, he felt he had to activly take arms to fight fascism.
(and like others mentioned, he joined not a anarchist, but a socialist militia, but not one under sowjet control, so he later experienced first hand, how the sowjets dealt with competition, which lead to "animal farm" and 1984)
But he did also met many anarchists and the differences between anarchists and socialist militias were rather blurry for the people in the trenches anyway.
What I really like about Orwell, as opposed to the usual glorifying propaganda - he just wrote down what he saw. The good and the bad. He did not close his eyes to the ugly side of the revolution (trash everywhere for example)
To me, the book was mostly an eyewitness account. Orwell himself remarks on the absurd amount of factions and how bizarre things were after returning from the front. I agree with your take that he went in quite blind, but you can feel that he has experience as a journalist. I was most impressed by his descriptions of small acts of humanity in a hopelessly complex conflict.
He however later explicitly called for revolution, and set out an explicit program for how he believed a revolution in England needed to happen, so whether or not it misrepresents his views at the time of Homage to Catalonia, he not only supported revolution but explicitly argued it was necessary towards the end of his life.
Which also leads to him making a fundamentally wrong analysis of the situation.
Now before you all yell at me, let me explain where I am coming from.
One of the great tragedies regarding the rise of fascism in Germany is that the left-wing forces did not manage to unite in time to stop it. Communists and social democrats preferred to fight each other instead. They did work together in the resistance later but then it was way too late.
This is fundamental for understanding the behavior of the communists in the Spanish Civil War. Simplified, they switched strategies from immediate revolution to focusing on fighting fascism first.
The Anarchist and other left-wing radicals like the POUM on the other hand wanted to do a revolution WHILE the republic was fighting for survival against fascism.
Do I need to explain why such a strategy was madness? They were destabilizing the country while not really contributing that much militarily. In a war you need a united leadership, you need clear hierarchies, that is how you win. You don't win with romanticism.
So what was to be done? Yes, the Republic had to get rid of these radicals.
I know people like Orwell's interpretation of history because it fits with their anti-communist biases. Sure you can say the communists had plans for after the war and you might not agree with those plans if you are not very fond of communism, that is fair. But saying the Anarchists and other left-wing radicals where the good ones, makes no sense. At least the communists did focus on fighting fascism.
There is reason other than the Soviets that prevented the communists to ally with the social-democrats in Germany: multiple deaths, smear campaigns, and genuine hatred.
But other than that you're 100% correct, the Soviet stayed with republican Spain until the end despite POUM secession in Catalonia.
> One of the great tragedies regarding the rise of fascism in Germany is that the left-wing forces did not manage to unite in time to stop it. Communists and social democrats preferred to fight each other instead.
That seems to point to some sensible people being in the ranks of the social democrats. Communism would have been a far bigger disaster for Germany than fascism - which is really saying something given that the outcome of fascism was the destruction of the nation and decades of foreign military occupation.
The real tragedy here is there were 3 political groups, none focused on and successful in increasing the prosperity of the people who they governed. They needed a competent liberal tradition.
> Communism would have been a far bigger disaster for Germany than fascism
This is a absolutely insane take. Especially in retrospect. Arguing that maybe some people did seriously think that fascism might the the less bad option would be a stretch and point to willful ignorance but arguing for this position now that the have the historical facts is insane.
Please go visit Auschwitz, visit Buchenwald and tell me again how fascism was the better alternative. That is where the "sensible people" in the ranks of the social democrats did end up. Dead. The Nazis did not stop at the communists, not at the social democrats, not at the trade unionists, not at the Jews, not at the queer people, not a the Gypsy and Roma, not at people with disabilities, not the "antisocial" people, not at anyone really.
Don't tell me how GULAGs were the same thing, they were not. Political repression in the Soviet Union was horrible but even the most intense years do not come close to the industrial scale murder the Nazis did. That es the equivalent of saying the US were not better than the Nazis because they put Japanese-Americans in camps and used the nuclear weapons. No, there were lots of messed up things but the crimes of the Nazis were of a quality that is unique.
Fascism is like a hot stove. People touched it, then there was a very visceral "nobody is doing that again!" reaction. The fascist states flamed out - often violently - and were absorbed into more successful ideologies. Ironically the outcomes have been, relatively speaking, pretty reasonable for the descendants of the fascists.
Whereas communism was just a big, ongoing failure. Countless deaths, brutal atrocities things like the Holodomor or the Chinese landlord butcherings. Nations plunged into poverty for generations. Instability and eventual collapse in the case of the USSR leading to a brutal decade and eventual quasi-dictatorship in Russia.
The priority, by far, is to suppress the communists. If communism takes hold a nation is doomed. Unwinding a communist takeover proved much more challenging than rooting out a Nazi infestation. In hindsight the Germans ended up with better outcomes. It is easy to imagine an impoverished communist Germany today because the communists ended up with half of the country after the war and we saw what happened.
> Please go visit Auschwitz, visit Buchenwald and tell me again how fascism was the better alternative
Those camps killed a few million people. While that is terrible; if that was all the Nazis did, they wouldn't be an especially memorable reigime - it is small biscuits to Mao or Stalin. The Holodomor doesn't get special mention like the Holocaust does, it is just another footnote to the long list of people that the communists starved to death.
> Political repression in the Soviet Union was horrible but even the most intense years do not come close to the industrial scale murder the Nazis did.
I dunno; I suspect that the communist famines came in waves of high- and low- intensity. It wouldn't have been annual famines, it would have been bursts of millions of people dying.
Picking on the Holodomor again because I have the wiki page open, that was ~4 million people in one year. That must be pretty close to the intensity of the Nazi's internal killing machine.
> Whereas communism was just a big, ongoing failure
If Fascism kept on going, it would not be just "failure". Catastrophe would be an understatement. If you are going to compare at least compare on the same basis.
But it didn't keep on going, and that was hardly an accident. It is similar to HIV vs SARS-CoV-2. If COVID lasted as long as AIDS, it'd be a much worse disease. But it doesn't, and HIV is actually the more serious of the two [0]. Similarly, communists taking hold are the bigger threat between fascists and communists - the communists will bring the host country a lot closer to death.
If we're talking counterfactuals, there is a decent chance that the Nazis and Communists would be similar to each other over the long term. Both ideologies do a lot of damage early on and then slowly collapse over a generation or two. The Nazis were more externally aggressive - but from an internal-to-Germany perspective (particularly at the time when nationalism was stronger) that would probably further reinforce the point that political alliances with the Communists are suicidal and defeating the Communists appropriately took priority over any other political issue.
[0] Although, thankfully, these days the treatment has apparently gotten so good that the analogy doesn't work so well. But think HIV in the 80s before they figured out how to deal with it.
It was accident that the dude also wanted to conquer the world, and doing so at the heart of the western civilization. So of course people had to get rid of him. There are regimes similar to the Nazi today that kept going on because it didn't bother the powerful guys that much.
The "conquer the world" part was the majority of the problem. If the Nazi's had stuck to conquering one or maybe even 2 countries they'd just be another unpleasant crowd in the unpleasant soup of history.
Ethnic cleansing programs aren't that unusual. There are a couple of high profile ones going on today. I'm no history buff but it is a stretch to say Germany stands a head above the other mass killings in history. Even at the time the European colonisers were not gentle men. The Germans obviously made the especially egregious mistake targeting wealthy Europeans who are supposed to be above that sort of thing and also heavily involved in the media which means they get much worse publicity than say, the Ottomans.
They weren't a threat on the same scale as getting Communists in the government. The Communists had a habit of escalating from run-of-the-mill ethnic cleansing to a sort of combined mass-death/economic collapse/generational poverty/social implosion disaster. They were literally the last people anyone should want to be politically empowering. The right option really was a no-compromise dedication to freedom, capitalism and liberalism .
> the communists had a habit of escalating from run-of-the-mill ethnic cleansing to a sort of combined mass-death/economic collapse
I don't agree with this assessment.
Regardless of the fact that ethnic cleansing can happen under communism, at the end of the day, their ideology isn't about that. It's about "common ownership of the means of production". On the other hand, social hierarchy, master race and so on, are major parts of Fascism (and "conquering the world" is not necessarily in it)
And even if you want to argue that their ethnic cleansing isn't that bad, what really bad is the dictatorship with no real coherent ideology other than some guy saying so, and the persecution of dissidents/intellectuals. I have no doubt that had they not lost in WWII, they would run the economy into collapse/slow death similar to the USSR anyway.
... who cares about ideology when stalin decides to starve your nation to death in manufactured famine?
Yes we are going to be starved to death but its for the common good of a working man!
Nazi economy was going to collapse, it was based on expansion and looting.
Many historians make case that hitler started war too soon, but they forget that germany was running out of time and needed war to prevent collapse of their economy.
Arguing about which regime was worse is silly. Counting victims and who kill who and why is meaningless. Both were bloody and run by paranoid morons who left their nations in way worse state
The idealogy is fundamentally about delusion and feel goodism over what works, which is why it is prone to authoritarianism and economic collapse (and famines, etc).
Lysenkoism killed approximately 30-40 million Chinese via completely avoidable starvation during the ‘Great Leap Forward’. Far more than Hitler killed (intentionally) through extermination.
And anyone with half a brain saw it was insanity - which is why those who spoke up got shot or sent to the Gulag. Because the ideology was fundamentally one that no one was able to question safely.
So they’re both mass murdering genocidal ideologies.
> the ideology was fundamentally one that no one was able to question safely.
so according to you there are only 2 ideologies in the world: dictatorship and non-dictatorship. I guess simplification is always a great start for an intellectual conversation. By saying that, you essentially dismissed the entire premise of this discussion, because fascism and communism are the same thing I guess, so what are we even talking about?
Also if you're going to compare body counts, then do it right
- First of all, all communist statistics are unreliable estimation, they didn't exactly brag about that to the outside world, do they.
- Second of all, communism was deployed to a much larger population, during a longer time frame, unlike fascism.
Seems like you're arguing communism is worse because it's not bad enough to die early, so it lasted and did more damage, which is a ridiculous argument.
I will not respond to everything because that would require a whole book but please let me highlight some historical facts that I feel you might have confused. You imply that famines were a regular occurrence under communism, this is wrong.
The was never a single famine in the Soviet Union after World War 2. In fact the CIA concluded that the Soviet citizens ate a similar amount of calories with slightly more nutritious food. [0]
Furthermore the idea of famines being typical for communism is contradicted by the basic historical fact that famines were a regular occurrence BEFORE the Soviets took power. The communist regime stopped famines from happening.
Comparing a famine that happened after the country was ravaged by the first world war AND a horrible civil war AND huge societal changes to planned industrial murder is insane.
> Nations plunged into poverty for generations.
Considering that Czarist Russia happened in one of the most backwards places on earth where people still used the wooden plow I would say the Soviet Union becoming a serious competitor to the US is very impressive. And current day Russia is doing rather well all things considered, surviving against at Western sanctions much longer than many predicted. I wouldn't want to live there but it is certainly doing better than many other countries in this world. China has seen a meteoric rise to power under a "communist" leadership. Cuba provide a vastly higher standard of living than comparable countries like Haiti.
It was mostly impoverished countries that have seen communist revolutions. You are confusing cause and effect.
Yes, Western Germany has done very well but is mostly due to the huge investment of the US in it as it was needed as a bulwark against communism.
We have an example on what the communists would do with Germany in Eastern Germany and well it is not very spectacular. No famines. No mass murder. The main issue where of course the wall between Eastern and Western Germany which separated families.
I will not deny the atrocities done during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, they are stomach turning. To say they are typical for communism is a bit dishonest considering the Soviets denounced Mao to the point that diplomatic ties broke. If we played the game like that, we would have to say that the Irish famine or rather genocide is to be considered typical for capitalism.
I don't really like comparing atrocities. Every single one is bad enough on their own.
The main point is that anyone with a shed of humanity has a duty to be anti-fascist first, after that we can battle out whatever system is better or worse.
> The was never a single famine in the Soviet Union after World War 2.
That is technically wrong [0]. But more importantly is the fact that you're arguing that most of the deaths were before WWII - ie, the USSR (single handily!) was comparable to the Nazis even before the Nazis went full Nazi. And then throw China in to the mix. This history is why it is a higher priority to root out powerful domestic Communists than to neutralise the Fascists. Even though both were terrible, the Communists managed to be the scarier of the two, even at the time.
From polish perspective, a nazis told you you are subhuman and treat you like it.
Soviets told you they are your best friend while torturing your brother and using you cousin to snitch on you.
You pick which oppression is worse - overt or covert.
Objectively soviets did way more damage and set Eastern Europe decades back. Under nazis you knew who was the enemy, under soviet everyone was paranoid who the enemy is.
Its still debating which one of your limbs to cut off.
Eh, I’d argue the only reason Eastern Europe might consider the impact of communism worse than Nazi’ism is because Nazi’ism flamed out quickly. So ‘stabbed with a knife once’ instead of ‘punched in the face daily for decades’.
Can you imagine how shitty it would have been if Germany had won WW2?
My guess is 1/4 of the existing population would have survived.
The only reason it wasn’t (quite) that bad is because they didn’t have the time to settle in and only murdered people they could easily find while on their way to the front.
If they had more time (and weren’t fighting a war at the time) the same would have happened but more directly murderous.
Frankly, it’s pretty crazy that they distracted themselves from a massive war (which had quickly turned to a war of survival/attrition) to round up and murder people in areas they had already conquered just because of religious affiliation. But psychos are gonna psycho.
> Communism would have been a far bigger disaster for Germany than fascism - which is really saying something given that the outcome of fascism was the destruction of the nation and decades of foreign military occupation.
Huh? Chemnitz, Leipzig, Potsdam etc were communist.
Germany is still under foreign military occupation. Only one of the armies left. The communists formed a Sinatra doctrine that the other foreign military occupation never did.
> Germany is still under foreign military occupation.
I think the US actually started withdrawing recently. But the point is the people in Germany are in a great position compared to anywhere that got serious about Communism.
The Chinese might be the first group to go from Communist to prosperous; we'll see how they go on a per capita bases. But when the dust settles it won't be because they have people running the show subscribe to communist principles of the 1930s Europe variety.
The one thing that is constant from the beginning of the book until the end is Orwell's antifascism. He believed it was essential to kill fascists, and that he had a duty to personally kill as many as he could.
At the beginning, he didn't really care whether he killed fascists under an anarchist flag or a socialist flag.
By the end, he was disillusioned with the unwillingness of the free world to support the underequipped antifascist forces. And he discovered to his dismay how Soviet authoritarians undermined the antifascist cause in their own drive to seize power.
It doesn't seem that he ever figured out the best way to fight fascism and authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but it's pretty clear that he still thought it was important to destroy them, and he saw up close how Spanish anarchism by itself wasn't very effective at doing that.
This makes him sound like a serial killer rather than a soldier or a writer. I don't think he gave a damn about killing any individual private or corporal on the fascist side except in pursuit of fighting their ideology, and so far as I know he never tried to assassinate Mosley. Opposing fascism itself was his goal.
The controversial second half of The Road to Wigan Pier contains a section where it seems Orwell regards individual fascists almost as mislead socialists and is strikingly sympathetic to them. See the paragraph that begins "In order to combat Fascism it is necessary to understand it, which involves admitting that it contains some good as well as much evil." It is obvious to me that he'd much rather stop them from becoming fascists before the declaration of war than kill them afterwards.
He also states pretty clearly, that he did not feel any hate towards the fascist sniper who shot him. Very british sportsmanlike, he said he would have rather congratulate him for the great shot.
> where it seems Orwell regards individual fascists almost as mislead socialists
Mussolini, the guy who, like, invented Fascism, was the editor of a socialist newspaper for a while. His views definitely grew out of Socialism, but with the stuff he didn't like taken out, and a whole heap of nationalism added in.
Eric Blair uses the word socialism in a way that is somewhat different from modern usage and especially he is not communist "Unfortunately, many in America equate Socialism with Soviet Communism.".
Libertarian Socialism also includes groups that do not consider themselves anarchist, such as Libertarian Marxist. All of which are closer to and more sympathetic to anarchism than "Soviet Communism", though.
> This line from the article seems to misrepresent Orwell...He makes it clear in his book that he initially had little understanding of the differences in ideology among the various left-wing groups, and chose to join the anarchists rather arbitrarily.
The one misrepresenting Orwell is yourself, he joined the communist POUM, not the anarchists.
He got a detail wrong, but I think this takes little away from his point. Orwell considered the possibility of joining several of the factions and his choice to join POUM was ultimately arbitrary. His choice to join was not due to a perfect personal alignment of his with the goals of POUM.
Thanks for the correction. One thing I definitely don’t remember from the book is the alignment of all the groups. I checked again and what happened was that the POUM (independent communists) ended up fighting alongside the anarchists against the Soviet-aligned communists.
The word primarily is important in my comment; snitching on CPGB members and fellow travellers to the government does very much make you an anti-communist.
Chomsky's first article, which he wrote when he was 10 was about the Spanish Civil War, he was reporting that Texaco the oil company was supplying the nationalists with oil, despite their being an official embargo, and the US government knew about it.
The pretense (official embargo, etc.) is gone these days, and the US openly supports repressive regimes and war criminal leaders as long as the money can keep flowing.
Things changed a lot since the predicted "End of History" and I struggle to understand what exactly led us here...
I think you answered your own question there. But then, this was true before history ended too. I strongly recommend "How to Hide an Empire" by Daniel Immerwahr - it's an easy and fascinating read.
for what it's worth, Chomsky is specifically an advocate of Anarcho-Syndicalism:
Anarcho-syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society.
I disagree. Anarcho-Syndicalism is a type of Anarchism that would be reasonable. There are other types that are also reasonable, and Chomsky is just as much for them.
The specifics of how workers in a capitalist society gain control of the economy, and replace it with democracy, are dependent on the culture, and what is possible.
Anarcho-Syndicalism is the greatest achievement in Anarchism in Spain though, so perhaps it is the most reasonable of the solutions, I'm only indicating Syndicalism is a possible way, amongst possible ways.
I think the cry 'down with the hierarchy' is morally correct, and replacing a hierarchy with nothing is foolish. Structure does not need to have any hierarchy. We should think less in terms of pyramids (only a few at the top)... maybe consider the humble circle instead where those insulated from change affect less of it.
So you have a equal circle of many people. And the need for fast action, like it often can happen in real life.
Well, let's just say I have been part of many circles - but fast action was never the result of them, unless the circle was really, really small.
And even if there is no need for fast action - debating everything with everyone all the time for every decision - is somewhat timeconsuming and draining.
This is the first question posed by and to serious anarchists, and so one of the most frequently and thoroughly answered. There's value in thinking it through yourself but I suggest comparing solutions afterwards.
So ... will you give an answer with your own words and if possible, your own experience how this works out in reality, if it is seemingly so easy?
Like I said, I not just casually read and thought about it, for 5 minutes from the comfort of my couch. I took part in such circles (also in catalonia for example). And those are my findings.
The Spanish civil war is a fascinating topic and I can't do justice to it in the small space of an HN comment. Many Americans were sympathetic to the republic against fascism. It's not surprising that Chomsky could have that as such a foundational piece of his left wing politics.
As a Spaniard myself it is shocking how many people believe the propaganda of being "Republic" vs fascism. If you consider Franco fascist because they were supported by Hitler, you should consider the other side communist for being supported by Stalin.
Because that is exactly what the "Republic" wanted in Spain, the dictatorship of the proletarian.
As I said there is too much to summarize here. The Republicans, communists, and anarchists were very divided within themselves and their "goodness" varied a lot from person to person, group to group. Certainly that coalition was flawed. These are all commonly cited as reasons for their failure. There are some positive things to take from them however. And I find it rather unambiguous that Franco was bad for Spain.
Franco did a military coup against a legitimate government. He proceeded to supress certain languages and rights of many people. It is because of his actions, not because of his associations, that he was a fascist.
It is revisionist, and very bad taste, to pretend he was not fascist.
Franco was semi-fascist (like Stalin btw) (Trotsky called that Cesarism in 1928) because he instated a very hierarchical society based on a cult of the nation, and a full press censorship along with historiography censorship. He lacked a fascist founding mythos (which makes him differ from complete fascism) : while he wanted his nation to be great again (reconstruction myth), he designated no real internal ennemis once syndicalism was banned, and no true external ennemi.
Also, the Spanish republic didn't 'want' a dictatorship of the proletariat at all (they used strike breakers forces once their scabs didn't work ffs), they had to accept it to keep the production going under the threat of Carlists and Francists, but they were pretty much on the side of the bourgeoisie until the civil war.
I've read all of George Orwell's novels. Homage Catalonia is good, but Down and Out in Paris and London is better; possibly his best. Everyone knows Animal Farm and 1984. Chomsky is one of the great minds of the last century, surely even he would tell you he read a lot more than Homage Catalonia to shape his Anarchism.
I think 1984 and Animal Farm have to be at the top of the list, in that order.
I agree Down and Out in Paris and London follows close behind, and the best of his essays come next.
I think Homage to Catalonia is not a great book, but valuable for the autobiographical insight about Orwell, and how it informed him to write those other, better works.
I would also add that Coming Up For Air is delightful and underrated. Try the audio book. Any middle-aged man can appreciate the quiet understated honesty.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”'
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".
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.
While there are many good answers to your question, here is mine, trying to answer as generic as possible:
Anarchy doesn't mean "everybody for themselves" in a chaotic sense. It advocates for the absence of a formal, hierarchical government, aiming for self-managed societies based on voluntary, cooperative institutions.
Here are key points:
1. Mutual Aid:
Anarchists believe in mutual aid and voluntary cooperation rather than competition and individualism.
2. Horizontal Structures:
They support horizontal organization without hierarchies, promoting collective decision-making.
3. Community Defense:
Anarchist communities often organize collective defense mechanisms to protect individuals from oppression.
The concern about groups oppressing individuals is valid, but anarchists argue that decentralized, community-based approaches can mitigate this better than centralized power structures, which often lead to greater systemic oppression.
What's important to add on here is that Chomsky wasn't a revolutionary anarchist. He talked a lot about changes within the existing framework [1] - such as increased power of labor - which were consistent with anarchist principles.
In general, it's important to generalize this. Most political philosophies are better understood and judged by the directions they demand existing societies move in rather than the final destination, which might never be achieved.
[1] EDIT: of the society he was living in, or see better comment below.
Chomsky has always been focused on pragmatic actions within the situation you are in. If that's Spain in the 1920s, he would be a Revolutionary Anarchist.
But most of the time he's speaking, it's not about Spain in the 1920s, so the specifics of actions that are pragmatic are different.
Similar to what you are saying, and I agree with some of what you're saying, but it would be incorrect to define Chomsky based on the tactics he feels are valid in a given situation.
This is where conversations about anarchism often break down.
Forgetting the language about everyone being for themselves, parent’s question boils down to “what happens when people don’t cooperate?”. The answer to that can’t be “people will cooperate”.
I think when you’re thinking about social structures of all kinds a useful perspective is to ask whether you’re creating a prisoner’s dilemma, and what the consequences of that could be.
It leaves room for non-cooperation. Although we really must define what non-cooperation means in this context.
Ending Slavery didn't leave room for the decision to non-cooperate with it, by continuing to own Slaves, or to be a Slave. Certainly depends on the specifics.
Just like Slavery was dismantled with no choice for those who wished it to continue.
This is a very difficult question to answer. Because it's a gradient.
Certainly it could tolerate it within a transition. You could imagine Worker controlled corporations entirely, however with private property still existing.
I also think it depends heavily on the definition of private property, which is a specific set of rules in every locality. Certainly some of those rules would be different.
But I think what you're getting at is, "What's the ideal?", and the answer I think would not tolerate private property.
But honestly, I'm not sure I believe that. Again, I can think of definitions I think work.
Problem is, we had these kinds of societies in the past, and they mostly got taken over and incorporated into societies with hierarchal structures, because those had militaries and were aggressive. Maybe I'm overstating that a little bit, but there was still plenty of conquest, and I don't see how a return to decentralized communities prevents that from playing out again.
Or alternatively, stops some communities from being raiders and pirates, and the eventual desire to have a stronger response that a hierarchy can bring to bear. At any rate, the current global order is very far from anarchy, and it's extremely difficult to see how it could be come about in part of the world without being taken over by countries with imperialistic ambitions. Imagine what Russia and China would do if somehow Europe and the US became anarchistic.
I mean this is great in theory, but in practice the first group that centralizes use of its resources quickly destroys each of the small groups in succession forcing the remaining groups to centralize. The centralized enemies will spend a massive amount in convincing your citizens that mutual/voluntary cooperation is bad (see Russia vs NATO).
Anarchists suffer the same problems as (actual) communists, fascist power seeking dickheads ruin reality for everyone. Power seeking behaviors have to be actively countered lest they pass an infection point they become self sustaining which requires a massive amount of coordination between parties.
This is precisely why these kinds of movements only work at small scale, or only for a short time at large scale before evolving into a power structure (by necessity).
Large scale horizontal structures simply don't work once the population exceeds the human capacity to remember everyone and their relationships to each other (approx 100-110 people). That's why ancient human foraging clans were always splitting at around 80-100 people until agrarian societies provided enough concentrated food and energy for specialization and hierarchy.
It's why horizontally organized companies start to fray after they grow beyond 100 people.
But you can separate into smaller groups, who send representatives. That's really why all this stuff ended up organized at the level of the individual shop, the individual factory.
The problem is when representatives that you send can't be recalled easily. You can think of this as a technical problem, since elections have been expensive historically to run.
There are ideas in the vein of "liquid democracy" that consider how we could arrange things with instant recall: e.g. if democracy were an app on my phone, and I could remove my support from my representative between the time they cast a vote and the time the vote is finalized, and replace them with somebody who will vote properly. This could be done completely without anger; I could restore the my support to the previous person after the vote. What it does is make my representative someone who I trust with my will for the moment not someone who owns my will.
Heh, instant recall would be great... just make some fake news and spread it around quickly and just get everyone recalled before they've had time to engage their brain.
Really at the end of this day all your voting system turns into is a popularity contest of stars and rabid attention seekers that can hold the average public attention for longer than everyone else. I'm not saying our current system is good, I'm saying yours is hilariously bad.
> your voting system turns into a popularity contest with rabid attention seekers that can hold the average public attention for longer than anyone else
What? This is of course what we already have in many western democracies. Adding the hypothetical ability to "recall representatives easily" as the parent describes doesn't cause this problem.
The root of the issue here is just representative vs direct democracy, and GP is obviously correct that technology could be allowing us to create/withdraw support closer to real-time than whatever the election cycle is. Not to mention just having more of a voice on more issues, like why do we need the representatives anyway?
Since in the limit direct democracy basically is anarchic, these types of discussions are IMO one of the best ways to ground otherwise theoretical discussions about anarchism and avoids the trigger word.
The truth is that most people on all sides of the political spectrum only want elections until their preferred king is in charge, then they become staunch royalists, supporters of dynasties/dictators/fascists, whatever you want to call it.
My paradoxical observation is that people who really believe in democracy are almost always anarchists, deep down. To test yourself, just ask whether you want the government to do things "in the interest of the public", regardless of whether the public agrees that it is desirable. If you "want to protect the public" from actually having their own preferences because "they don't know better", this paternalism is right next door to fascism. It doesn't matter much whether you're forcing them to pay for good things like education programs, or for bad things like an unjust war. When you go down the road that "representatives are necessary because the people can't make decisions" or that "term limits are necessary because the public is fickle", you're really saying you just want democracy until your preferred king is installed.
Because it is a full time job that most of us want to do for free.
I don't even have the time or resources to properly evaluate ballot propositions that come around every couple years let alone all the decisions made by people I elect and those they delegate to.
Yes, a different perspective on a subject that's somehow failed to materialize in any way (beyond 100 people for any reasonable length of time) after over a century of philosophical thought, theory, and attempts...
The reason Spain didn't work, which was on a large scale, is not do with anything you mentioned.
It was brutally crushed by all major nations in the world. You can't say how it wouldn't work otherwise, because it did work, and was crushed with violence.
Ah yes... "It only failed because of the concentrated efforts of THE ENEMY, who couldn't bear to see it succeed."
Now where have I heard that one before? Oh right, it was Putin, explaining why communism turned into a monster, and communism was in fact inflicted upon poor Russia by the west to destroy their socialist paradise...
This is how zealots speak. Their philosophy and their people are pure and innocent. Therefore any time it fails, it can only be THE ENEMY's influence.
It literally failed due to the concentrated efforts of the world. That's historical fact.
That doesn't mean it wouldn't have failed for specific reasons if allowed to continue, however we don't know what that failure would be, and stating it as was done, is a ridiculous idea.
Welcome to the world that will gladly concentrate its efforts against you, reiterating the point of the post above you.
Which may be the answer to this entire thread, anarchism isn't going to work unless the world decides to let it work (hint, people in power aren't going to let this happen).
You can make much more substantive arguments against Anarchism that are reasoned, and reasonable. Making things up instead of understanding the historical record is a choice.
And yet some like the swiss survive the whole world preparing to come down on them.it can be done .. nowadays with weapons of mass destruction more than ever.
Anarchism is explicitly not about everyone for themselves
Pierre Prudhon, who was basically the first anarchist wrote about all of our social obligations in all of his works - read chapter 4 of “what is property” to see what this looks like applied to interrelaional labor exchange
Further, Adam Smith, who you could also argue was also an early anarchist wrote in the theory of moral sentiments about the same thing
similarly for Emma Goldman similarly for Kropotkin etc..
So there is a fundamental lack of understanding about what anarchist philosophy actually is, it would seem, that prevents an actual discussion about it
> there is a fundamental lack of understanding about what anarchist philosophy actually is
this problem is ever-present among ideologues, and may be one of the ways you can identify a from-first-principles totalizing ideology and differentiate it from legitimate schools of philosophy
Many political -isms suffer from this problem, and the "true believers" all inevitably hold in their head what they believe to be the correct definition, about which they will always correct non-believers and bicker about with comrades.
Regardless, it's all a waste of time, because if you can't even define your ideology you will never see it manifested.
Its much closer to libertarianism. In fact, many of the hard core libertarians are more accurately described as anarchists. Realistically if we use the (poor) political compass, "anarchy" is everything below the center line. That's the vertical axis: anarchy-authority.
There's also a good discussion from Moxie Marlinspike (creator of Signal)[0]. He discusses some of the things you're asking and I think this can answer better than a comment.
Libertarianism was indeed first started by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, who described Proudhon as a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian"[1].
But modern US-style libertarianism has one very central difference: Support for private property, which was anathema to Dejacque, who firmly supported Proudhon's infamous "property is robbery".
The "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" blog (frequently posted on HackerNews) has an interesting series on how non-state societies organize to achieve collective action, like raising an army. The series focuses on the Celtic people in contrast to the Romans.
I do find it quite interesting how this particular implementation of an agrarian non-state society has very different outcomes than typically envisioned by anarchist theorists, particularly in regards to power/wealth/influence concentration, the emergence of social hierarchy, warlords, and the poor living conditions experienced by those at the bottom.
A bunch of people are trying to explain philosophy here, but you have hit the nail on the head. Anarchy very quickly turns into warlords. Even when described philosophically in other comments all I can see is feudal and tribal structures with never-ending conflicts (or the republican equivalent, like the Italian city-states in the 1400-1500s).
I might suggest reading the text in question. Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" will give a much more three dimensional view of "anarchism" than what we tend imagine from first principles. Even just the first few chapters are well worth the read: https://files.libcom.org/files/Homage%20to%20Catalonia%20-%2...
I think I get it, it's radical egalitarianism. It just turns out that hierarchical decision making works better for running complex organizations (e.g. an army), so anarchism (i.e. a vacuum of centralized power) nearly always leads to a warlord taking power. The US basically got lucky that Washington didn't want it and set a republican precedent for other colonial independence movements.
There is no evidence that hierarchical decision making works better for complex organizations.
It's possibly true, but there's no evidence it is.
I guess the question also depends on what is "better". Certainly it's better for those with authority, but it's very difficult to compare that with another structure.
> It's possibly true, but there's no evidence it is.
I mean, which leftist revolutions lead to a radically egalitarian society instead of an authoritarian? If there is one, I'd love to read about it.
"Better" as in, more likely to prevail in real terms. You can obviously go too far with that and paralyze yourself within a hierarchy, but some is better than none.
I almost feel like warlording is learned behavior like how a dog doesn't know to pee with the leg lifted until it sees other dogs doing it. Consider doing something like going to a park. Everyone in that park is on equal plane in terms of using the resources. No one is forming gangs to tax usage of the swing set, people are generally polite with others. However, if you come to a park and the warlording is already present maybe you have no choice but to pay a tax to use the swings or face a club to the head.
In poor neighborhoods with a weak state presence gangs do tend to regulate the usage of the commons. In wealthier neighborhood, social norms and police presence prevent that.
Self-regulation is only possible in small communities via social norms, but then you have conflicts if your neighbors instead.
The obvious solution in big societies is enough socialism for everyone to incentivize generally polite society.
I have lived in cities big and small by orders of magnitude difference, and the park experience is the same. I'm sure gangs do what you describe in certain areas. But still I think what I am trying to get at is for the vast majority of people and things, we tend to operate pretty evenly. The rich and poor go to the beach and you can scarcely tell who is who when they are in polyester shorts sharing the same resources as everyone else. Are police maintaining this? Perhaps, but there are also beaches that don't have regular policing or active lifeguarding and they look generally the same in this regard as beaches that do. Maybe theres the threat of punishment if there would be something done but realistically the police don't work like they do in movies and TV and won't proactively respond before you get a black eye.
If people worked out how to be a bad person at a beach thats learned behavior. They might study the law. realize there are loopholes to exploit. Maybe realize they could argue the beach is private property and not public and kick everyone out. People do this, yes, but part of me imagines that they only attempt to do this because they know others have done similar things and are supported by lawyers and advisors who are finding ways to do this thing. Its not a natural response. Natural is probably a child working with other children they don't even know on a sand castle.
You are talking about the social norms I referred to. There is no natural response - those things are learned behaviors (that may be genetically influenced). Not all poor neighborhoods lack social norms, the ones that do have less available commons due to higher rates of violence and petty warlordism.
> But still I think what I am trying to get at is for the vast majority of people and things, we tend to operate pretty evenly.
When is the last time you saw a rich person take the bus? How many of them lobby for higher taxes on themselves to increase the availability and accessibility for regular people? It wasn't working class families hiring disabled "guides" to help them skip lines at Disneyland. There are plenty of ways that things are not operated evenly, even for things that are technically available to everyone.
> Group formation seems to be natural way humans organize up to a state level.
Not quite. There have been many alternatives to state societies in history, so states are far from the only way to organize even largish society.
That said, state societies have spontaneously arisen at least 6 times and perhaps a dozen times. And the rise of states tends to either motivate neighboring polities to form states in response or pretty inevitably get extinguished by the states. Given the frequency of spontaneous reinvention of states, and the seeming inevitability of their expansion, even if states are not the only way to organize large polities, they do seem to a local if not global maximum.
Which is what the articles of confederation were moving closer towards, decentralized affiliated states. It was a move closer towards anarchism but ironically many anarchists would have a meltdown if we suggested going from what we've now to that.
Not really. Anarchism is a historically leftist movement. It's about rejecting hierarchy and coercion, not necessarily rejecting all notions of social duty, shared fate, cooperation, human care and support, etc.
In decades of being on the internet, I have yet to meet two anarchists who use the same definition of "anarchism". Certainly I know plenty of people who would excoriate you for saying it "means no unearned hierarchy".
It's impossible to philosophically engage with anarchism, because every anarchist rewrites its definition on-the-fly to win whatever argument they happen to be in at that moment.
Especially now when there’s often talk of criminalizing political speech and protest to, ostensibly, “protect _our_ democracy”. Who’s democracy it is is never explicitly stated, but I think it’s not mine.
There was always talk like that, but from only one side, so you probably did not hear it or take it seriously then. Now, however, it has shifted to come from the other side as well. I mused at length about this here some months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38119795>
Great write up. However, I believe there has been a shift in what kind of people are filtered into the top. Like, there seems to be this trend selecting for "meta players" to some greater extent internally in the parties as well as quarrelsome over cooperative. I dunno what the mechanism for this is.
My pet theory is that the only major change is that there’s now much less of a filter over the information that reaches the populace. The regime can’t quite figure out yet how to deal with this without undermining its own legitimacy, flimsy as it may be. It used to be you had to go through the newspapers or tv to get anything out, and both are controlled by a very small group of people. To the extent that there was diversity of opinion it was because the two wings of the uniparty disagreed with one another. Nowadays trust in the press is at historic lows and actually reading it makes one _less_ informed than not reading anything at all. So people turn to social media and personalities they trust there. End result: an actual democracy could break out for the first time since Ancient Greece. The Uniparty can’t tolerate risking tens of trillions in money flows on some highfalutin’ bullshit like that.
I agree with this. For anarchism to be successful, the first step would be to relabel itself to something else other than anarchism, because this word is currently almost meaningless. An almost similar thing also happened to communism, every group has a different definition to the point that they cannot agree anymore on what communism is.
That's one interpretation. Another us the idea that only voluntary interactions and transactions are legitimate -- i.e. taxation or forceful socialist takeover of capital is archist.
The common thread is the idea of decentralized, ideally evenly distributed, power.
Plenty of anarchist movements have supported armed dismantling of the state, and by extension takeover of capital by dismantling the means by which property rights are enforced and removing them.
> Another is the idea that only voluntary interactions and transactions are legitimate -- i.e. taxation or forceful socialist takeover of capital is archist.
That's not another idea, that's really the same idea. Voluntary interactions are not unearned. The only problem with that is that it accepts kings (i.e. the legitimacy of primitive accumulation and the fencing off of the commons.) If you just say that King Charles owns England, and everything within it, he can even force you into a contract in order to use his roads to leave.
But of course anarcho-capitalism is a legitimate Anarchist strain. As it is now, it exists with a fake pedigree from Objectivists and Libertarians, who are simply Republican anti-communists minus the Christianity, but you can see the same beliefs within what was at the time accepted as fairly orthodox anarchism in Benjamin Tucker.* There are still interesting libertarians that don't accept primitive accumulation, and simply think that the creation of interlocking markets is a better way to organize a free society than the glorification of wage-laborers.
I'm largely a Rudolf Rocker anarchist myself, and Homage to Catalonia changed my life as well. Speaking of groups, I was a card-carrying anarchist who volunteered at the 223 infoshop in Portland during the 90s. I had always suspected that Chomsky was an anarchist, and the confirmation was when he spoke in town and made his first political donation to that same infoshop. It was his first occasion making a political donation of that type, and everybody in left politics noticed.
edit: A quote from John Zerzan, an primitivist (or the primitivist) anarchist who hated Chomsky, illustrating how impactful that donation was:
> In the fall of 1995, Chomsky donated much of the proceeds from a well-attended speech on U.S. foreign policy to Portland’s 223 Freedom and Mutual Aid Center, better known as the local anarchist infoshop. As if to honor its generous benefactor appropriately, the infoshop spent the money first of all on a computer system, and several months later financed a booklet promoting the infoshop and the ideas behind it. Among the most prominent quotes adorning the pamphlet is one that begins, “The task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realizable...” The attentive reader may not need me to name the author of these words, nor to point out this less than qualitatively radical influence.
edit: I would also mention that Benjamin Tucker was almost entirely in line with current Libertarian thought, still thought of himself as an anarchist and a socialist, and was one of the biggest misogynists possible. When people seriously engage with ideas instead of stereotypes, they come out in weird places. When you seriously engage with ideas instead of conventions, you start to realize that we're already in a weird place.
Don't be vague, what about his comments on Covid vaccines was statist? As far as I know, he only called for social shunning of the unvaccinated, not state action.
In fact, in this interview, he declares opposition to a vaccine mandate, and doesn't even call for social shunning - he instead suggests that the unvaccinated should take it upon themselves to self-isolate. https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/noam-chomsky-calls-for...
You missed the end of the clip, where he said that if people don't self isolate, "then you have to do something about it".
Basically, he wants everyone to be ideal, and if they don't fit his ideal, they should be compelled.
This view is no different than any other tyrannical regime, in that regard; what dictator or oppressive group wouldn't want the entire populace to be completely compliant with their demands?
Is there much of a difference? If all stores ban the unvaccinated for example? Is that “shunning” in line with the underlying principles?
Even though I am vaccinated, I personally reject calls for medical discrimination and violations of bodily autonomy. I think it is one thing for individuals to make choices and decide who they want to invite to their house. But I think it is another thing entirely for public or private employers or other places to ban people on such traits.
Whether it is forced by the government or not, doesn’t make a difference to me. But I will also note that the line can be very blurry to begin with. For example, many cities have public transportation that is operated by private entities.
Surely whether its forced by the government or not does make the difference here? Isn't that like the whole problem? Otherwise wouldnt this all essentially be complaining about a "No Shirt No Service" policy at a McDonald's?
If you are an anarchist, and you truly feel that McDonald's hierarchy is just as problematic as governments coercing behavior, OK, you do you.
But if you're not an anarchist, and you're arguing anarchists think this way... that is not the way any of my anarchist friends think about the problems of corporate hegemony vs. government coercion.
They are against both, but consider them vastly different problems, in scope as well as kind. Juxtaposing them and saying there's no difference... is not what any anarchists I know would do.
It's an argument I've heard from anarchists. Not that they are identical in scope (because that's blatantly wrong) but that they are both to be overthrown.
This came up in a conversation where we were talking about various charities we might do something for, and since there was a Ronald McDonald House charity office nearby, I had suggested it.
The mere association with McDonald's corporate made it entirely unacceptable.
It's my opinion that his old age, combined with the fact that he was always surrounded by optimistic young people, activists, and extremely wealthy people who respected his critiques of power, started distorting his views on contemporary issues. I don't think that it reflects badly on him, being out of touch is a proof of his extreme success; it's inevitable that your success forms its own bubble.
Specifically, I don't think he considered the degree to which people in power would lie about what they knew about the actual characteristics of the disease to such an extent, which means that he had fallen out of touch with his own work.
edit: Covid being as weak as it was was just luck. The next disease could be almost the same, let's say like MERS with a possible 35% fatality rate, but with a long asymptomatic incubation time during which people are at their most infectious. If that happens, we'll still have to grapple with the questions that Chomsky dared to give answers to.
>When Chomsky was in his teens he read Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” “which,” he told me in 1995, “struck me as amusing but pretty obvious”
What a massive tool. Animal Farm was so obvious to Noam Chomsky that he forwent writing it, and he's going to make sure that you know.
This type of grifter personality would also be the one that lies about his stated political models, assuming that their essential nature is "pretty obvious" to Chomsky. The end result being his contribution to division and chaos.
Chomsky is only pro anarchism when it comes to the West. He is perfectly fine with communist/post communist regimes rampaging around unabated and uncriticized.
I would call his stance as "West bad, West always bad and at fault for everything!!1".
This is incorrect, and a common meme that people use to paint his thoughts as simple, when the reality is far more complex and nuanced, and has nothing to do specifically with the West.
He talks about the West because as a citizen of a country in the West, he has more culpability and responsibility for it's actions.
As well the United States is the largest military and power, and in all cases, the largest Authority is always the one with the most crimes. It's as true for the US, as well as all of history.
I've read most of his books and pretty much bought into a lot of his analysis around "manufacturing consent", corporate power, etc, 35 years ago. I still think it's largely correct .
However, I also waded into the Khmer Rouge business and his words are uncomfortably close to justifying Pol Pot. Complex as that situation was there's really not any excuse for what the Khmer Rouge did.
You can also read his actual words on Ukraine/Russia (easy to find) and see the same tendency there.
At the same time, his analysis on the US and ME wars is more accurate, IMHO.
This seems to be a pit some otherwise excellent minds fall into: one side bad implies opposing sides are somehow good.
"I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury and so on and so forth." - Noam Chomsky
I very carefully read through this issue years ago when Christopher Hitchens came to his aid. Yeah, that Christopher Hitchens, the much later Iraq War II fanatic.
I'm not going to repeat the exercise but at the time it was a teaching moment for me, that anybody can get things wrong. I would not be surprised that he walked back his initial strongly held stance, good for him.
The Ukraine/Russia stuff though is just ridiculous, but he's old. I know (former) world class scientists who are old, and also sadly ridiculous. Terrifying when you yourself are getting old.
When the US invaded Cambodia in 1970, Prince Sihanouk was ousted and Lon Nol took charge. Sihanouk then allied with the independent Cambodian communists, and after a war in which the US bombed Cambodia more than Europe was bombed in WWII, the coalition of Sihanouk and the communists took over in 1975.
In 1979 the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and took over much of the country with the help of Vietnamese aligned communists.
The US then began arming the coalition of Sihanouk and the communists not aligned with Vietnam. It also fought for their seat at the UN.
So the US began arming and supporting Pol Pot in 1979, as did China. This was covered to one extent or another in the New York Times, Nightline etc.
Don't really get people tut tutting Chomsky being a Vietnam and Cambodia dove when the US was arming Pol Pot starting in 1979.
> when the US was arming Pol Pot starting in 1979.
There is no concrete evidence the US armed the Khmer Rouge.
At best, there is some evidence that some of the non-lethal aid provided to rival groups might have made it to the Khmer Rouge, but that's a far cry from arming them.
When Sihanouk and the communists are in alliance in 1975, and the head of state is Sihanouk - everything is blamed on the "Khmer Rouge", whatever that means.
When the US begins arming the coalition of Sihanouk and the communists in 1979, then all the arms are going to "rival groups" in the Sihanouk/communist coalition. It's ridiculous.
The KPNLF were in a coalition government from 1982 on with Sihanouk and the communists, whom you call the "Khmer Rouge". In fact the coalition with the communists happened as soon as the US began funding them - it was probably ordered by the US.
Any how, the US fairly openly armed what you call the Khmer Rouge, I guess a sliver of plausible deniability is enough for the minority of people like you who want to deny it. Nightline even did a whole segment on it.
Conflating the KPNLF with the Khmer Rouge, a group they were literally formed to fight - whose members suffered during Pol Pot's reign of terror, because they joined a coalition government in exile for expedience is just nonsense. The Red Khmer were Communists.
The KPNLF were essentially strong armed into a coalition government by the Thai - who threatened to cut them off from aid and boot them from the country - and to gain international recognition and aid. They waited until the last possible moment to join and remained hostile towards the Khmer Rouge.
If you have a link to this Nightline episode, I'd love to see it. I couldn't find it.
It is very much correct. Chomsky's relationship to truth is flimsy at best when it comes to anything related to the West's foreign policy.
His position on Vietnam War vs. war in Ukraine provides a nice illustration. In the former he was demanding an unconditional pull of US forces from Vietnam, in the latter he was asking Ukraine to capitulate to invader's demands. The only consistency in his opinions is the "West bad".
I don't see how you can equate US forces in Vietnam with Ukraine considering peace talks to end the war in their country.
If the US invaded Mexico, he would presumably consider the US invasion a war crime but might still consider Mexico making concessions their best course of action. It wouldn't be that he supported the US's war, continuing to fight is not always the best option for the people.
>continuing to fight is not always the best option for the people
People who let themselves/are forced by rest of the world (Yalta) be conquered by soviets end up murdered by the xxx thousands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre, raped en masse, send to Siberia, and their land plundered down to bricks and pipes. We have seen that 100 years ago, 80 years ago, and we see this today with russian soldiers stealing toilets from conquered Ukraine.
> I don't see how you can equate US forces in Vietnam with Ukraine considering peace talks to end the war in their country.
Why? What makes peace negotiations in Vietnam (1968-1973) different from peace negotiations in Ukraine, and how is it relevant?
> If the US invaded Mexico, he would presumably consider the US invasion a war crime but might still consider Mexico making concessions their best course of action.
Well, he didn't call for negotiations or any concessions or from the Vietnam side, instead explicitly called for unilateral pull-out of US forces.
If only Ukrainians realized they lack any agency and are being manipulated by US, surrendered already and died like in Bucha everything would be right with the world once again!
Its always someone living in a safe corner of the world (Chomsky, the Pope) advocating for appeasement and giving up your rights to the aggressor.
I mean, usually these types aren't the ones who see the world as bisected into "the West" and "the rest" to begin with, so I am suspect of your characterization...
This line from the article seems to misrepresent Orwell. Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve read Homage to Catalonia, but I’m pretty sure he arrived in Spain without any grand ideas of being part of a revolution, and quite simply wanted to fight against fascists. He makes it clear in his book that he initially had little understanding of the differences in ideology among the various left-wing groups, and chose to join the anarchists rather arbitrarily.