Another great work of Murray Bookchin's -- which may be more topical here -- is an essay called "Towards a Liberatory Technology". I believe much of the ideas overlap with this writing but that essay is a shorter version just on technology. I believe it was later combined into a book called Post-Scarcity Anarchism
> Until this phase of history or prehistory, the elders and males rarely exercised socially dominant roles because their civil sphere was simply not very important to the community. Indeed, the civil sphere was markedly counterbalanced by the enormous significance of the woman's "domestic" sphere. Household and childbearing responsibilities were much more important in early organic societies than politics and military affairs. Early society was profoundly different from contemporary society in its structural arrangements and the roles played by different members of the community.
Are these based on any kind of archeological evidence?
It's an active area of debate with archeology and anthropology. It's generally been assumed that hunter-gatherer societies were very egalitarian, but there's a lot of evidence that this is an over generalization.
We now have pretty good evidence of small-scale societies being very hierarchical and evidence of larger scale societies being extremely egalitarian. In addition, the general categorization of the political organization of these societies seems to be the most problematic thing. In just 200 years, western society has profoundly changed the way we self-organize so there's no reason to think these societies somehow remained the same for millions of years.
Instead we see evidence of deep experimentation in most societies. Some even varied drastically from season to season. For example, the Cheyenne (Suhtai and Tsitsistas) and the Lakota of the Great Plains in the 19th century would appoint a leader with basically absolute authority during the late summer for buffalo hunts. The rest of the year they were extremely egalitarian with no one holding any formal power. Similarly, many societies experimented heavily with forms of agriculture and hybrid forms of subsistence and would adapt their form of social organization to adapt to those forms of subsistence.
So yeah, it's problematic to make such a generalization. However, it should also be noted that many scholars have recently pointed out that the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest might've had a larger impact on the core debates of the European Enlightenment than past European thinkers did. People from the Pacific Northwest likely had a lot of experience living in large hierarchical urban societies like Cahokia (which at one point was larger than any European city) and their egalitarian politics can be examined as a direct response to this experience. Anthropologists have also documented what they unfortunately named "Missipization" that spread throughout much of Eastern North America after the decline of Cahokia, possibly bringing with it a wave of democratic forms of political organization.
From my lay understanding of anthropology, having read stuff by people like David Graeber, it does seem pretty well established that pre-agrarian societies were mostly organised non-hierarchically, or at least with very limited social stratification.
I'm assuming that local resource scarcity leads to more social hierarchies to manage and politic over the scarce resources, while those with abundant resources tend to not have significant social stratification because there's less incentive towards infighting.
Seems like all societies would eventually devolve towards resource scarcity, since abundance will almost always lead to over population.
Since humans have invented simple and painless birth control, this is no longer the case. Birth rates are falling across the world (including poor traditional societies), and are below replacement in many countries, basically in 100% of the Western civilization.
I personally believe birth rates are falling not because of easy birth control, but because the Earth is already extremely over populated and resources are increasingly scarce per capita.
If anything, easy birth control is simply making the population correction softer than it would otherwise be, e.g. through war and famine. If we're lucky, our population will continue to decrease relatively peacefully and painlessly to a sustainable level, or until we open up new frontiers of resources and people feel like they have enough breathing room to start expanding again.
> I personally believe birth rates are falling not because of easy birth control, but because the Earth is already extremely over populated and resources are increasingly scarce per capita.
People don't really make personal choices based on global level data. So I'd say there are two problems here:
1) is that there is enough to go around without wrecking the environment. For instance, it is markets that cause famines, not crop failures - a fairer way to distribute food (and organise its logistics) would ensure that nobody ever starved. Likewise shelter and so on.
2) People are mostly choosing not to have children (in rich countries) because of the precariousness of their own existence. Why have kids when you can be fired when the market turns and be left to a hostile welfare system? Why have kids when your landlord's right to evict you is considered more important than your right to a stable home? The real choice people are making is about not having children who might end up living in poverty. Secure people with rights have kids: the parents of the baby boomers are a great example of this, choosing to have big families after the war because they were encouraged and facilitated in doing so.
Statistics show that often poorer families in precarious circumstances have more kids than well-off families.
Interestingly, your logic partly applies to well-off, too: the standards of some families are so high that they consider it impossible to keep them while having more than 1-2 kids.
Many people choose to not have kids because it's a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time. They prefer to pursue other, more easily rewarding goals, like their careers. Pursuing a career while at the same time caring for a (small) child is notoriously hard, for pretty natural reasons: you can outsource being a mother only to a certain extent.
> My use of the word hierarchy in the subtitle of this work is meant to be provocative. There is a strong theoretical need to contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of the words class and State; careless use of these terms can produce a dangerous simplification of social reality. To use the words hierarchy, class, and State interchangeably, as many social theorists do, is insidious and obscurantist. This practice, in the name of a "classless" or "libertarian" society, could easily conceal the existence of hierarchical relationships and a hierarchical sensibility, both of which — even in the absence of economic exploitation or political coercion — would serve to perpetuate unfreedom.
> By hierarchy, I mean the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer. Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a "classless" or "Stateless" society. I refer to the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of "masses" by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their "higher social interests," of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality, and of nature by society and technology. Indeed, classless but hierarchical societies exist today (and they existed more covertly in the past); yet the people who live in them neither enjoy freedom, nor do they exercise control over their lives.
No one's going to have time to read this whole thing to comment here, but I skimmed some of it and I get the impression that this guy wants to comprehensively eliminate "hierarchy" in favor of "freedom." That kind of thing strikes me as one of those perhaps philosophically satisfying but completely impractical ideas. I really doubt humans were built to implement such a radical vision (maybe something very far in that direction is possible, but not so complete as implied here).
Smallpox was a god of death which one could hope to avoid and defend against, but never kill, from at least 300 BCE until 1958. Humanity finished the job in 1977 (for now).
While there are many things to criticize about anarchist thought and practice, one thing I hope will never stop and we should not dismiss as "utopian" is the sheer gumption to question one of the fundamental assumption in almost all political ideologies - that someone must be in charge - and then seriously consider the implications of trying to structure a society not only without coercion, but also with positive freedoms.
I.e. , at it's best, anarchist thought tries to find ways of ensuring welfare and ensuring that the "private charity and philanthropy" often cited as the solution to poverty will manifest as a feature of the system, without needing to rely on (soft) coercion, scarcity and centralization, to the point of considering ways on how to structure meetings so that the shy and slow will also be allowed to contribute their perspective and thoughts against the brash and bold.
While I might not agree 100% politically, I think we should point to (and if so inclined, work on) specific problems we find in the arguments/implementation and not shy away from the ambition itself.
The point to take from it is (in my opinion) that our grasp might exceed our reach if we do not shy away tackling big projects at on some level. There is a fine line between this and "just believe and it will become true" bruhaha, but I agree with Hans Rosling on his idea of "possibilism" http://thirdways.net/factfulness-possibilists-book/ vs pessimism and optimism.
If the only criticism people can muster is "seems a bit much", then they didn't really engage with it. You can make an argument that hierarchies seem "natural", but "naturally" I and many others should be dead (childhood diseases), basically blind (very near sighted), multiple times a father already (nearing my 30s and sexually active) so even that is not really a strong rebuttal of the anarchist project. I think it might exist, but it warrants proper ponderance (at least when discussing deep thinkers like Bookchin), not dismissal.
> I.e. , at it's best, anarchist thought tries to find ways of ensuring welfare and ensuring that the "private charity and philanthropy" often cited as the solution to poverty will manifest as a feature of the system, without needing to rely on (soft) coercion, scarcity and centralization, to the point of considering ways on how to structure meetings so that the shy and slow will also be allowed to contribute their perspective and thoughts against the brash and bold.
Maybe it's just me, but the anarchist writing I've skimmed seems to fetishize the mechanisms they think will achieve the world they want to see.
I mean, suppose you beamed some pre-digital anarchists to the early 2000s and showed them how Python development was done over the internet. Are they going to be able to grasp the essence of what's happening? E.g., "Oh, I see there's a trap door under that so-called benevolent dictator. So anyone in the world with access to the internet could pull the lever to fork his kingdom and do with it as they see fit with their new copy of it. I suppose that's a playfully clever end-run around decentralization. Great job!"
Something tells me they are going to say, "A benevolent dictator is centralized. That's bad and so we must work to obliterate the hierarchy." I think that because there seem to have been a number of bright digital-era anarchists who wasted reams of time trying to decentralize a design that could have been done much more easily as a centralized project with a free software license.
First: I agree with you, but it's a general human failing to fall in love with our own solutions or just ones that we vibe with. I think the critiques are always more generalisable than the solutions.
That being said, I think it's idle speculation, because it depends on how well you explain the state of the world, how open the human you are grabbing would be etc. It also depends how paranoid you are about communities being stuck to a single point of failure (most BFDL really aren't, in that there is a lot of dependence on the "underlings" that is made explicit in the structure of things, but the brand and spirit of the community might depend on them being around as a Schelling point) and other factors.
I also think it is very worthwhile to think about decentralising the BFDL model if you make it work by self selection, I mainly study the mechanisms of well working anarchist groups and most that I see are as heavy on Praxis (actually improving material conditions) as on theory and ideology. I'd recommend trying to look up organisations like this (in Germany, the FAU is an example for an anarchist Union that has risen to the challenge of organising gig workers and are very interesting to read about)
One thing to be aware of is that Bookchin explicitly rejected the anarchist label late in his life, and wrote several rants against his anarchist contemporaries being overly doctrinaire.
As for Python development, the hierarchy there is voluntary given that all participants are volunteers, and that the source is available for forking (and forming your own community around the fork). Such forks didn't happen in practice - or died quickly after being made, as with "Python 2.8" - because the benefits never outweighed the costs so far for most of the community.
> No one's going to have time to read this whole thing to comment here, but I skimmed some of it and I get the impression that this guy wants to comprehensively eliminate "hierarchy" in favor of "freedom."
Ronald Coase has examined this idea and clarified why it does not work. Voluntary hierarchies exist, and we put up with them because a hierarchy-based organization - for all its well-known drawbacks - can oftentimes be more effective than completely free association.
The problem is that hierarchy-based decision making is also significantly more effective than the usual implementations of direct democracy, even on the "confederate" basis Bookchin advocates for. At best, we might consider delegative democracy with "liquid" recall, which effectively merges elements of both direct and representative democracy. Perhaps it could be enhanced by sortition, i.e. actual direct democracy among a randomly-chosen sample of the population, and forms of voluntary deliberation such as prediction/betting markets.
Authoritarian decision making can be argued to be significantly more effective than democratic one in general. The question is whether that efficiency is worth it.
I would suggest looking more into it, then, because what Bookchin actually proposed in the end - what he called "libertarian municipalism" - is not "completely impractical", and nowhere as radical as what most anarchists propose.
As far as practicality goes, well... the political system in AANES (Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria, aka Rojava) is organized largely along the same lines, except that they call it "democratic federalism" - and it seems to be working pretty well so far, 10+ years in.
For another, even longer-running example, look at the Zapatista autonomous regions in Mexico, and some municipalities that went down the same route afterwards (e.g. Cheran).
I always wonder about those communities though, AANES seems to (looking in from the outside) rely heavily on ethnocentric and cult of personality (Occallan) dynamics, as well as the unifying pressure of Daesh/Turkey? And the Zapatista regions had the same things with the Subcommandante (although they seem to have avoided a full on cult of personality with him stepping out of the limelight now) and seem to rely on the unifying threat of Mexico/Narcos? Or am I missinformed (and if yes, where can I get reliable information about this)?
(Note that this is the 2016 edition, which replaced an earlier one from 2014, and is itself in the process of getting updated at the moment. They seem to subscribe to the notion that such things are supposed to be living documents.)
AANES is not majority Kurdish at this point, and several cantons are politically Arab-dominated. They did have some tensions in areas that they took over from Daesh, specifically with the more conservative rural Arab populations there pushing back against the feminist agenda that PYD brings; those are often perceived as being along ethnic lines from the outside, but I think it would be more accurate to call it an ideological dispute that happens to align with cultural (and hence ethnic) boundaries.
In some cases they actually had to dial things back to reach compromise; for example, the 2014 social contract stipulated that elected assemblies must have no less than 40% members representing each gender (defined as male or female; there's little trans awareness there). The new Arab cantons basically had a hard time even finding enough women candidates willing to run to fulfill that quota, so it was dropped in the 2016 contract. But they still kept the co-executive system with the informal expectation of at least one of those going to a woman. For another example, the very name AANES (and before it DFNS) was a compromise to avoid "Rojava" - the latter literally means "West" in Kurdish, as in Western Kurdistan, and thus has some Kurdish nationalist implications that other ethnicities weren't happy about.
PYD is also explicitly in opposition to KNC (in Syria) and KDP (in Iraq), and other nationalist Kurdish groups who explicitly seek an independent ethnically Kurdish sovereign nation-state. There was some collaboration between them early on in the civil war, when the focus was on resisting the Syrian government; but once it withdrew its forces from the region, the ideological differences were in full force again, to the point where there were some skirmishes between the PYD-affiliated YPG and the KDP-affiliated Peshmerga.
As far as Ocalan's cult of personality - it's definitely there, and it bothers me as well, but it seems to be the case of the guy who originally built it around himself now genuinely trying to promote democracy and anti-authoritarianism by capitalizing on his ability to deliver propaganda that will definitely be listened to. I doubt they'd have as much success with the whole women liberation angle, given how conservative the society is overall, if it wasn't Ocalan endorsing it. Still, the cult remains a very dangerous thing, and it is perhaps for the best that Ocalan is still in prison and thus can't fully tap into its power.
Another interesting thing is that at least the outward symbols of said cult seem to be negotiable. In particular, there were several cases where YPG splattered Ocalan posters in Arab settlements where the locals pushed back against them, seeing them as a symbol of Kurdish nationalism; the posters were then promptly taken down. Of course, it doesn't mean that the sentiment behind them is gone, but still...
That's pretty much the central principle of anarchism (the political philosophy and practice, not the colloquial slur). Dismissing it as "impractical" is a bit premature - it's a concept well grounded in ethnological examples, and there have been plenty of very cool modern social experiments.
In any case, it's conceptually useful to orient vis a vis hierarchy in this more general way, even if the "full realization" is difficult to imagine achieving.
> That's pretty much the central principle of anarchism (the political philosophy and practice, not the colloquial slur). Dismissing it as "impractical" is a bit premature - it's a concept well grounded in ethnological examples, and there have been plenty of very cool modern social experiments.
Would those examples entail a large reduction in social/technological complexity? The world has billions more people than would allow a return to hunter-gatherer or small-scale agriculture type societies.
Also I don't think something being a "central principle" of a political philosophy necessarily means it shouldn't be dismissed. I read some article about anarcho-capitalism once, and the whole thing struck me as something that may be conceivable or even realizable in principle, like Oganesson [1], bit simultaneously so impractically unstable that it might as well be treated as impossible.
> In any case, it's conceptually useful to orient vis a vis hierarchy in this more general way, even if the "full realization" is difficult to imagine achieving.
Yeah, it makes more sense to me to use it as a yardstick than as a map to someplace you can actually go.
Anarcho-capitalism as a phrase was basically Rothbard trolling. What ever merits it may have, it shouldn't be lumped in with the rest of anarchist philosophy.
(also to be clear I think ancap has approximately zero merit)
Anarcho capitalism is an oxymoron because capitalism is heavily based around centralization and inevitably leads to monopolies. Corporations are less democratic than the government and the competition argument doesn't work for monopolies.
Ancap is an oxymoron because it's predicated on strong abstract property rights, and you really need a fairly large government to enforce them. And if you take those away, you end up with something more like mutualism.
Well, yes. If you properly implement it, most utopias will look similar. Where most anarchists diverge from libertarians, minarchists or "anarcho-capitalists" (even though people might criticize me for the scare quotes) is that they go further in their demands on what counts as "justification" and place a higher focus on positive freedoms. And this is where it gets tricky and there is need for further insight, experimentation with organisation, cultural development...
For the record, I meant to regard 'left-libertarianism' in the modern sense (which is practically libertarianism plus social insurance) as basically compatible with minarchism, in a broad sense. And ISTM that most demands for "positive freedom" are ultimately about social insurance.
Ah, okay, the probably yes. But it's still natural, since one influenced the other heavily.
Also, Social insurance, but also affirmative action and regulation of common goods, although none of these need to be state driven.
One of the neat details that I think is underappreciated and underexplored about Germanies (my native country) public health care system is that it is public and democratic but not state, it functions more like a specially regulated cooperative system, which tends to work quite efficiently. So there is design space for a minimal "state" (which in anarchist circles would be expected to be much more decentralised and democratically run anyway) while still fulfilling a lot of services by "the public"
Yup, the German healthcare system is definitely a very interesting example of how large-scale social problems can be solved without the state running everything.
(It also confuses the hell out of American liberals, largely because many in those circles genuinely believe that every developed country outside of US has some form of single-payer healthcare, and that a decent non-government-run healthcare system is impossible in principle.)
> It also confuses the hell out of American liberals
Only the ones who don't travel enough to understand how weird US culture is.
> is impossible in principle
Not in principle. I suspect it is impossible in the US without a significant cultural shift, somehow. A disturbing fraction of the country seems to consider the commonweal to be an old-fashioned concept or the domain of suckers.
I suspect nothing is possible in US on the federal level because of the lack of consensus.
But e.g. the Canadian (single-payer!) system is bottom-up - it originated with the provinces and is still run mostly by them, with the feds getting into the game relatively late and focusing mostly on funding and interoperability of the provincial systems. In theory, any Canadian province can withdraw from that system and run its healthcare however it sees fit, including a fully private system - it's just that it's a political non-starter even in the most conservative ones.
It's not clear to me why the same approach hasn't been tried more broadly in US, not even in deep blue states. All the focus is on the federal level, where it gets the most pushback, and where the party deadlock is the worst.
