Ask an Anarchist
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Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Ajidica asked about it a while ago, and I've been promising an answer, because it's a really interesting and important issue, but I haven't really been able to scrape together the spare mental energy to give it the considered reply it deserves.
Not sure if it is the appropriate post to share this, but I recently experience a mini-version of "anarchism" in Hong Kong within the "occupy zone of the umbrella revolution.
I have not even "think" about the word "Anarchist" for years until I met one inside the occupy zone. (I stay there a few nights in the tents) We have discussion for over an hour and he explain why he think anarchism works and how it will function and all that. Although me and other people there did not really agree it will work, but I can understand why he is so excited.
While the whole protest is not really about anarchism, but about getting a fair election system (basically it is asking for more fair government, not abolish it). The occupy zone themselves are really in a state of "anarchy". It really changed my mine as I thought it would not work at all until I experience it.
Some background: this movement has no leaders, people just come and go as they wish, things are organized on facebook, whatsapp and forums; non of the political parties can take leadership as the protesters hate to be "used, they want to keep the movement "pure" and disapprove any form of "leadership".
Also, the occupy zone has no currency, as the volunteer "resource station" do not accept donation of money, they only accept physical goods like bottle water, fruits, face masks, tents...etc. However any one can just go to one of those resource stations and take what he/she need. Also, while I am sitting there, suddenly there will be ladies bringing soups, rice and other food they cooked. Then there will be fruits, desserts, con-gee.....every single day. (no wonder Beijing say the evil USA is behind this, it must be those CIA agents cooking congee and soup for us
)
There is no one there to tell you what to do, but people still find things to do by observing what is needed: for example, there is not enough toilet paper, someone will bring back more, the floor is dirty, we will clean it; the road is hard to cross, people will build a bridge with whatever materials they can find on site... Now we even have a study area with table, chairs and a roof, built slowly over the weeks. There is no police (at least not in uniform) but there is voluntary "prefect"; and people also organize themselves so we have one "team" to defend each "wall" that is blocking the roads, they communicate with each other by walkie talkie. Every week you see new creations, from "citizen shower room"a, mini library (books are donated), to all the statues, paintings and other art forms. Its a art explosion that have not been seen in the city for decades. Its a very strange and unique experience.
For better understanding I suggest to search "umbrella revolution" in google images or find videos in YouTubes, then you may have a better understanding of what I am saying.
And finally my question: I find out that communication technology/media is extremely important for the whole community to function; as I would not know what is needed/ happening without facebook or online news. Smart phone is really essential as it can capture the latest developments and spread it through social media. Also, I find out people will get resources that they do not need; people may steal toliet paper, food and take them home. So my question is what type of technology we need until we can achieve a basic form of anarchism? Personally I think it is almost impossible until we have infinite energy (like nuclear fusion) and a form of communication medium that cannot be corrupted by anyone. What is the view on this from an anarchist?
I have not even "think" about the word "Anarchist" for years until I met one inside the occupy zone. (I stay there a few nights in the tents) We have discussion for over an hour and he explain why he think anarchism works and how it will function and all that. Although me and other people there did not really agree it will work, but I can understand why he is so excited.
While the whole protest is not really about anarchism, but about getting a fair election system (basically it is asking for more fair government, not abolish it). The occupy zone themselves are really in a state of "anarchy". It really changed my mine as I thought it would not work at all until I experience it.
Some background: this movement has no leaders, people just come and go as they wish, things are organized on facebook, whatsapp and forums; non of the political parties can take leadership as the protesters hate to be "used, they want to keep the movement "pure" and disapprove any form of "leadership".
Also, the occupy zone has no currency, as the volunteer "resource station" do not accept donation of money, they only accept physical goods like bottle water, fruits, face masks, tents...etc. However any one can just go to one of those resource stations and take what he/she need. Also, while I am sitting there, suddenly there will be ladies bringing soups, rice and other food they cooked. Then there will be fruits, desserts, con-gee.....every single day. (no wonder Beijing say the evil USA is behind this, it must be those CIA agents cooking congee and soup for us
)There is no one there to tell you what to do, but people still find things to do by observing what is needed: for example, there is not enough toilet paper, someone will bring back more, the floor is dirty, we will clean it; the road is hard to cross, people will build a bridge with whatever materials they can find on site... Now we even have a study area with table, chairs and a roof, built slowly over the weeks. There is no police (at least not in uniform) but there is voluntary "prefect"; and people also organize themselves so we have one "team" to defend each "wall" that is blocking the roads, they communicate with each other by walkie talkie. Every week you see new creations, from "citizen shower room"a, mini library (books are donated), to all the statues, paintings and other art forms. Its a art explosion that have not been seen in the city for decades. Its a very strange and unique experience.
For better understanding I suggest to search "umbrella revolution" in google images or find videos in YouTubes, then you may have a better understanding of what I am saying.
And finally my question: I find out that communication technology/media is extremely important for the whole community to function; as I would not know what is needed/ happening without facebook or online news. Smart phone is really essential as it can capture the latest developments and spread it through social media. Also, I find out people will get resources that they do not need; people may steal toliet paper, food and take them home. So my question is what type of technology we need until we can achieve a basic form of anarchism? Personally I think it is almost impossible until we have infinite energy (like nuclear fusion) and a form of communication medium that cannot be corrupted by anyone. What is the view on this from an anarchist?
Of course it's not really a stateless place, just that it is like a special zone within the city where you feel stateless.
Security wise, yes there are still police outside the zone, but it is also far from a safe place. Anti-occupy citizens, China's spies/security personnel, pro-china groups (business of other interest groups), triad gangs...etc are all potential dangers we face every day and night; the police will come, but they usually come "later"; letting the anti occupy people demolish our tents or kick away the food/resources first. People definitely face more violence inside the zone (verbal or physical) and they can only rely on those around them. We do not even know each other's name (as most are reluctant to give out full names for safety reasons); but we have to rely on each other to maintain a minimum sense of security. Like we need to keep at least 1~2 people awake at night to watch, taking shift; as people may come at night to demolish our walls or even do other harmful acts. After 1 month now I still do not know anyone's full name, but I trust the food people give us, I can go to the public toilet where toilet paper never run out (without the government refilling it), i can sleep knowing that someone will keep watch staying awake. Its an experience very hard to explain unless you are here.
All in all, it is not an anarchy, but it let me find out a lot of problems one would face without a government. The same thing cannot happen in a culture like mainland China, where even the milk powder your baby drink can be poisonous. This whole thing require that you can trust the person that live next to you; and this kind of trust can only happen when the society's culture, education, mutual respect...etc are ready. There are lots and lots of things an anarchy require that only a society with government can provide; that's my take.
I mean that Japan or Wal-Mart couldn't just walk in and annex it.
Borachio
Way past lunacy
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It's true that Japan hasn't visited Hong Kong in anything approaching a walking in and annexing way since 1941.
As for Walmart, I think you may have spoken too soon.
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking_news_detail.asp?id=5237
As for Walmart, I think you may have spoken too soon.
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking_news_detail.asp?id=5237
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
They're not operating entirely statelessly, but they're operating beyond and to a large extent against the state, so I think it's relevent. It's a temporary, strategic sort of commonwealth, to be sure, but it exists none the less as an ongoing location of stateless self-activity.
What's interesting to me is that this true even though the protests in Hong Kong are direceted largely towards the state. Statelessness, here, is appearing as a necessity rather than a deliberate act. These people didn't set out to create some microcommonwealth in the middle of Hong Kong, yet they've gone and done it none the less. These people aren't anti-statists, but they've created an area of opposition to the state; ideologically, perhaps, only to the unreformed Hong Kong state, but in the content of their activity to the state as such. Even though the reforms being demanded are quite moderate and the extent of self-activity is, if I'm honest, largely spectacular (there hasn't been any major sustained strikes in connection to the protests, for example), it's still significant.
I mean, that's pretty much how the Paris Commune kicked off. Despite the presence of revolutionaries, most of the Communards began as ordinary people who wanted certain reforms, and the whole thing just took on a momentum of its own, often despite the advice of the revolutionaries. I'm not suggesting that this will amount to anything so historically significant, I don't think the conditions or there (and given how bloodily the Commune ended, that's probably for the best), but it emphasises the point, made by Marx at the time and largely ignored by Marxists since, that social movements are more a matter of how ordinary people react to events than of leaders and philosophies.
As you say, they're still operating with certain background assumptions of state-activity, but I don't think that's a fundamental issue. Park's repeatedly made the point that we can't imagine anarchism as a EUIII government type, something enacted over a defined territory all at once. It's something which emerges, through self-activity, and there's always going to be a length of time when states and movements against/away from states share the same space. That's what we're seeing here, I think, if only in a sketch.
I think you're right that an ideal anarchy would require super-abundent energy and perfectly open, accountable communication. (Most anarchist sci-fi deals with the ways that less-than-perfect technology means a less-than-perfect anarchy.) But I don't think that we actually need an ideal anarchy to justify living without a state. We don't expect an ideal state, after all, but because the state is a reality, we accept that imperfection.
No stateless society in the forseeable future is going to be perfectly libertarian, perfectly egalitarian, perfectly anarchistic; imbalances of power will occur, as they've occurred throughout all human societies. We should be honest about that. What matter's is how we negotiate these imbalances as they emerge. One of the really important things to come out of the anthropology of stateless societies, which I think Marxists tend to overlook, is that the lack of political power in "primitive" societies isn't just a state of nature, a lack of evolution towards the state, but a constant process by which power is dispersed throughout the society. What distinguishes stateless societies isn't just the lack of political power, but the active evasion of political power when it emerges.
Of course 'anarchism' can emerge, on a micro-level. Look at the kibbutzim- do you think that what they became can properly described as anarchist? No movement of this type has ever shown that it can supplant the state, except in moments of extreme weakness (Syria) and when no other state is moving to replace it.
Your ideas are pitched at such a high level of abstraction that they can be made to fit anything.
Traitorfish has acknowledged in the past that it is still abstract thought.
Mouthwash: who organised the kibbutz system? Was it run by the state, privately by individuals with its permission, privately by individuals against its permission…?
Mouthwash: who organised the kibbutz system? Was it run by the state, privately by individuals with its permission, privately by individuals against its permission…?
I understand your point. You don't seem to understand mine.
Anarchism can exist easily at the fringes of state power. I'm saying that it has never even begun to resist the state in any meaningful way.
EDIT: forgot which thread this was, sorry for hijacking.
It was extremely cooperative. Usually each community was self-organized, and they worked together to bring in Jews even though they didn't have a political consensus. A lot of it was funded by Jews in Europe, but it's not like it was anything but a net loss to them.
I haven't actually read much about the period, so even Traitorfish could probably tell you more.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Well, yeah, large-scale social revolution supposes a crisis of state power. There's never been a major peasant or working class revolt that I know of that didn't begin with some fracture within the state or the elite. The mythology of the people rising, as one, to envelop all foes is just not historically tenable. There's no October without February, y'know?
A lot of anarchists do maintain this perversely Leninist assumption of the state as this big, enduring monolith, something that is conquered, and seem to differ from the socialists only in that they hope for a more spontaneous rising of the masses. This is not only practically suspect, to me, but also bizarrely un-anarchist. Surely to be an anarchist is to believe that states aren't actually very capable? Not simply that they're bad or nasty or wrong, but that they aren't a very efficient or robust way of organising people, that they're prone to fracture and weakness and collapse. Park pointed out that people think states are like buildings, stable structures which must be deliberately demolished, but that states much more like spinning plates, a continuous process prone to coming apart very quickly.
The kibbutzim are quite interesting in a lot of ways, but in practice they're more an example of agrarian cooperativism than any sort of anti-state project. They never really challenged the state, and in fact as I understand it were informally-sponsored by the early Labour Zionist government, who saw them both as a useful way of developing Israeli agriculture and an exemplar of what a socialist Israel could look like. They're workers' cooperatives, essentially, taken to an extreme, and an admirable experiment so far as that goes, but never represented any kind of revolt of the subaltern classes.
Yeah, that's certainly a fair criticism of how I've argued in this thread. I should and occasionally do try to develop some of these ideas further in reference to real-world examples, but the problem with real-world examples is that they're not always directly relevant to the issues at hand, and often themselves quite limit as experiments in statelessness. Most enduring, comprehensively stateless societies have been simply-structured and involved low-density populations. Modern experiments in statelessness tend to exist either on the periphery of a state society, or emerge as brief, often tragic experiments in self-government, so neither have to or have time to address the full range of issues emerging in an anarchist society. Further, in both cases, you're always dealing with a very particular set of historical circumstances, which aren't every going to be replicated in the quite the same way.
One of my long-term plans is definitely to do more concrete research on life outside of the state; I've had the fortune to fair bit of time studying stateless Native American societies academically, and I'd quite like to read something on Caribbean maroons and on the cossacks, all of which interest me because they're playing a very delicate, sophisticated game of organising enduring and relative substantial stateless societies alongside (rather than simply on the margins of) large, frequently-capitalist states.
Terxpahseyton
Nobody
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I have been told that there was a community in Venezuela which self-organizes in a rather anarchist way. Or even a small city. I am not sure, but perhaps you dig something up if you care to look into that direction.
I still don't think you understand my criticism. I'm referring to the simple unipolarity that the state creates. Decrease the need for industrial-scale projects, lower the size of a society exponentially, decrease the amount of relative harm any individual can do, sprinkle in tribal bonds and ethnic mythology and it's very easy to see how an stateless society can flourish. It's just not so easy to implement in the People's Republic of China.
There's also a problem of geography, which can create political power and help to consolidate it. Israel/Palestine is the perfect example of imperialist terrain.
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