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