Working examples of anarchy/is it possible?

[Kim Chee]

Yep, lotsa Anarchists here. What does Anarchy mean to you? I've found several definitions. I like the idea of a "leaderless" state where people do what is necessary to make daily life work. I simply do not see anarchy as a viable way for a group over fifty people to get along harmoniously. I'm all for political change/reformation, but is Anarchy the answer? If so, how do you envision it?

Do you have a favorite example of a functioning group?

 

[Matt Derrick]

i've always described myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, which basically means firing all the bosses and taking collective power over the work place. I feel like it could possibly work on a larger scale, but I am also a realist and don't believe we could ever get rid of money (although we should outlaw the ability to make money from money, you should have to produce something, aka no wall street bullshit).

Although I haven't been there in years, a good example of anarcho-syndicalism is the Red Emma's coffeehouse/bookshop in Baltimore. They're collectively owned/run and have been a smashing success for the past 8+ years

 

[Kim Chee]

...(although we should outlaw the ability to make money from money, you should have to produce something, aka no wall street bullshit).

This is a very Christain belief (no charging of interest).

Although I haven't been there in years, a good example of anarcho-syndicalism is the Red Emma's coffeehouse/bookshop in Baltimore. They're collectively owned/run and have been a smashing success for the past 8+ years

Do they make an effort to avoid economic disparity amongst workers? Are owners and employees compensated differently? I was not able to tell by the link provided.


***further inspection found that their Website says every worker is an equal owner.

 

[Ristoncor]

Not much of an expert myself, but Stefan Molyneux does a really good job explaining all that stuff. There's a free downloadable book on his website, freedomainradio.com called Every Day Anarchy that I thought it posed some interesting arguments. He does a podcast and has a Youtube channel.

Adam Kokesh has a show on Youtube too, but it's not as informative from what I've seen. He did do a pretty good debate on statism against The Amazing Atheist, but it's a little annoying to watch because neither off them let the other talk.

As for my personal opinion, I think it could work, but I'm not too familiar with the idea anyway. My main principle is anything that does not hurt another person should be allowed (things that hurt others are fraud, violence, etc). So at this point I'd probably consider myself a minarchist, but then again, I'm not so sure. I go back and forth.

 

[Sip]

I'm a big fan of the venus project, Anarcho-communism, and the moneyless state. People are hard on communism, saying that its seen its day and failed. The fact that we've never seen legitimate communism on a large scale seems to be ignored by most. In my opinion, the only reason it "won't work" is because people believe that to be so.

 

[drewski]

I think "Anarchy" is human nature because it's not a system. It's chaos. People can organize without leaders and do well within the chaos, but that only happens in small places scattered in different parts of the world.

I don't see "Anarchy" as the answer, because there is no answer. And even though "Capitalism" is certainly not the answer, doesn't mean anything else is the answer. Again, going back to chaos, which is nature, it can't be stopped.

One thing is forsure, we will be on the right fuckin' track when we find ways to survive that don't require finite resources, when people are educated that the world has exceeded maximum capacity a long fuckin' time ago and that more children are not "the future".

But really, people just want to live how they want to live. And if they're lucky enough to find people with a similar idea, they collectively form and create their own society. It works for those people, but then you have billions of other people that want it differently. This is fine, and should be free for everyone on earth to do.

The problem is that people in this world think that other people who have different ideas shouldn't be allowed to do what they want to do, and that they should be stopped and conform to their model they've created. This is stupid to me. It's child-like and has no logic whatsoever. But it's what the powerful forces of the world are doing to the people, and it's all going to end with the people taking their lives back, or just willingly giving it away more and more until those three words: it's too late.

Summary: No collective, society, whatever you want to call it holds a standard model of how it should be done. Some people are just better at handling their own shit while others need to put it into the hands of someone else.

 

[Ristoncor]

@Sip

I'm a big fan of the venus project, Anarcho-communism, and the moneyless state. People are hard on communism, saying that its seen its day and failed. The fact that we've never seen legitimate communism on a large scale seems to be ignored by most. In my opinion, the only reason it "won't work" is because people believe that to be so.

Does anarcho-communism include a lack of private property? Would everything be shared o r . . . I've only heard bits and pieces before and I'd like top knows your take on it.

 

[drewski]

@Sip


Does anarcho-communism include a lack of private property? Would everything be shared o r . . . I've only heard bits and pieces before and I'd like top knows your take on it.

Wikipedia yo.

 

[Margin Walker]

For 99.9% of the time our species has existed, virtually all human beings lived in band-level nomadic gatherer-hunter societies largely devoid of hierarchical social dynamics, let alone institutions. Anarchy is in our bones. It's the context in which human beings evolved over millions of years.

 

[Kim Chee]

For 99.9% of the time our species has existed, virtually all human beings lived in band-level nomadic gatherer-hunter societies largely devoid of hierarchical social dynamics, let alone institutions. Anarchy is in our bones. It's the context in which human beings evolved over millions of years.

This all works until the population gets to a certain size. I'm thinking that it is the size of the group that influences whether or not it can operate with some degree of functioning anarchy. Also, any group within the borders of the US is also operating under the "capitalistic umbrella" provided by the remainder of the nation which isn't anarchistic. The non-anarchistic members of the larger society seem to tolerate rather than appreciate anarchy from what I can see.

 

[MolotovMocktail]

I think it can work on a small scale. There are several shops and houses in Seattle that operate as collectives running on anarchist principles. They still have to deal with the capitalistic system they're placed under but places like Left Bank Books (where I volunteer) and Black Coffee Co-Op are good examples of collectively-run non-hierarchical establishments.

 

[Bizarre Odor]

I would recommend reading Fire from the mountain. Its about Nicaragua's revolution in the 1980s.

 

[Margin Walker]

This all works until the population gets to a certain size. I'm thinking that it is the size of the group that influences whether or not it can operate with some degree of functioning anarchy. Also, any group within the borders of the US is also operating under the "capitalistic umbrella" provided by the remainder of the nation which isn't anarchistic. The non-anarchistic members of the larger society seem to tolerate rather than appreciate anarchy from what I can see.

The increase in population is made possible by increased division of labor, domestication, sedentism, and agriculture, and is amplified by industrialization, modern medicine, chemical fertilizers, commercial fishing, and as always, the process of colonization and dislocation/genocide. I know you didn't specify what you feel that "certain size" to be, but well before we see the emergence of cities, mass society, or globalization, we see the origins of private property, raids, warfare, patriarchy, institutionalized hierarchy, increasing specialization leading to increased reliance on experts and rulers, class society, the erosion of community, and other trends antagonistic to anarchy.

Mass society is not the cause, but a consequence of the authoritarian trajectory set already in place in these earlier stages of domestication and civilization.

Obviously, despite our evolutionary and cultural heritage of egalitarianism, we are posterity to 11,000 years of collective trauma and systemic violence. Before we conceptualized anarchy and wildness, we lived it. Most people aren't familiar with the ideas and history of anarchism, but regardless of the fact, even the most tyrannical members of our culture love, break laws, become corrupt, share food, value freedom (if only their own). We aren't a hierarchical species; we live in a hierarchical culture, which socially and economically rewards upward mobility at others' expense, whether we're talking at the individual, demographic, class, or cultural level.

I don't see the state, corporations, or the dominant culture tolerating those actively and effectively resisting colonialism and oppression. I see dislocations, assaults, murders, federal harassment, subpoenas, jail and prison time, and ecocide. I do see tolerance where I see ineffectiveness, assimilation, and commodified subcultures, but then, it's easy to adopt a label, stance, or identity, or engage in ritualized demonstrations, join organizations, sign petitions, and the rest of what less and less often passes for resistance; particularly in first-world countries.

 

[Kim Chee]

So, are groups who practice anarchy going to continually be subjugated and destroyed as they are unable/unwilling to amass population in numbers to provide an adequate defense? If so, it seems anarchy is a failure in the sense that in order to be successful, one must survive. An anarchistic state would be seen as "easy pickins" for some invaders hell bent on "making theirs ours".

I started this thread with the hope that I might see more real working examples of functioning anarchy whether on small scale or large groups. I'm unaware of any large groups which are able to function autonomously. I do hear people mention sovereignty, but it seems it is more like "what it was" or "what we want" rather than "what we have".

 

[Margin Walker]

So, are groups who practice anarchy going to continually be subjugated and destroyed as they are unable/unwilling to amass population in numbers to provide an adequate defense? If so, it seems anarchy is a failure in the sense that in order to be successful, one must survive. An anarchistic state would be seen as "easy pickins" for some invaders hell bent on "making theirs ours".

I started this thread with the hope that I might see more real working examples of functioning anarchy whether on small scale or large groups. I'm unaware of any large groups which are able to function autonomously. I do hear people mention sovereignty, but it seems it is more like "what it was" or "what we want" rather than "what we have".

When I read "groups that practice anarchy", I think of examples of anti-authoritarianism, such as the remaining nomadic gatherer-hunter cultures struggling to exist on the ever-expanding margins of civilization, traditional indigenous peoples resisting colonialism the world over (not to package them, label them anarchist, or imply that they're practicing anarchy) whose cultures are vastly dissimilar, and in many instances, radically different from ours, and self-identified anarchists of various stripes striving to understand and dismantle oppressive power dynamics in their lives and social circles. I think of people diametrically opposed in their lifeways and/or their ideas to the "conquest abroad and repression at home" that has always defined civilization. Less cohesive examples or moments of anti-authoritarian tendencies come to mind in the form of criminality and other attempts at autonomy and non-mediated life.

I don't believe in mass movements, neither in terms of their effectiveness, nor in their capacity to be anarchist, and that certainly goes for revolution, too. I don't believe in a Golden Age or anarchist utopia, whether past or future. There will be no millennial new dawn or monolithic triumph. We're unlikely to ever see a world is which civilization totally collapses or all states totally fail and no one subjugates themselves or anyone else. I think it's realistic to say that neither domination, nor liberty will ever be absolute in the global sense. This doesn't negate workable examples of anarchy, whether in the form of human social organization, historical uprisings, or the dynamics active in successful anarchist social spaces.

Anarchy, as expressed in the individual capacity, is an unremitting refusal to play neither the part of tyrant, nor slave. It's checking yourself and others in your life, so as to discourage or exile hierarchical social patterns and oppressive power dynamics; it's resistance to the institutions those dynamics create and perpetuate.

 

[Matt Derrick]

@Sip


Does anarcho-communism include a lack of private property? Would everything be shared o r . . . I've only heard bits and pieces before and I'd like top knows your take on it.

i have no idea if this falls into anarcho-communism, but i've always liked the idea that in an ideal anarchist society, there would be a big heavy line drawn between "private property" and "personal property".

private property is that warehouse owned by a corporation for tax write off purposes that could be squatted and turned into a community center. it's property that can be leveraged to make more money or leveraged in a way that exploits people/society without giving anything back (parking lots, etc).

personal property can be thought of as the squat a group of people live in. or your car, or your bike, or the apartment you rent. it's yours, people can't just come along and take it or claim squatters rights on it.

just my half-assed take on property.

p.s. why do anarchist only drink green tea? A: because proper-tea is theft! ho ho ho...

 

[Rob Nothing]

define "working". is the system in place right now "working"? and if it is how will we know when it isn't?

Let my readers ponder the enormous disproportion between what the spanish revolutionary masses have given, and continue to give, and what they have gained. And between the forces that are in them and the efficiency with which they employ them. There are many consequences, but what interests me most is the emergence of a generosity at times truly sublime.

If anyone should ask me: ‘Do you think that anarcho-syndicalism is an ultimate factor in Spanish politics?’ my answer is ‘Yes’ and that neither today nor ever can it be neglected. Lastly, if anyone should beg me to be explicit as to my own view on anarcho-syndicalism as a political fact, I return to what I have said already. Here is my formula; it is a non-political formula. People too full of humanity dream of freedom, of the good, of justice, giving these an emotional and individualistic significance. Carrying such a load, an individual can hope for the respect and loyalty of his relations and friends, but if he should hope to influence the general social structure, he nullifies himself in heroic and sterile rebellion. No man can approach mankind giving his all and expecting all in return. Societies are not based on the virtues of individuals, but on a system which controls defects by limiting the freedom of everyone. Naturally the system takes a different form under feudalism, capitalism and communism. Let anarchosyndicalists invent their own system, and until they have attained it, go on dreaming of a strange state of society in which all men are as disinterested as St Francis of Assisi, bold as Spartacus, and able as Newton and Hegel. But behind the dream there is a human truth of the most generous kind — sometimes, let me insist, absolutely sublime. Is not that enough?

Ramón J Sender, Seven Red Sundays

 

[drewski]

p.s. why do anarchist only drink green tea? A: because proper-tea is theft! ho ho ho...

LOLLERSKATEZ

 

[Margin Walker]

Anarcho-syndicalists: define "work".

 

[drewski]

Anything that you don't want to do, but have to, in order to survive is what I would call work.