An anarchist is never late. Nor is he early; he arrives, like, whenever, you're not the boss of me.
Unless we drop down to the very small level, I don't see how it is physically possible to get anything done with each person being involved in the major decisions on a level that would be acceptable to an anarchist. I live in a city of 60,000 and I quite honestly cannot envision how you can get 60,000 people to all be involved directly in major decisions.
What's important to me is that everyone be directly involved in every detail of decision making, but that they remain in ultimate control of the decision making process. Autocrats can delegate; so can anarchists. Small meetings delegate to bigger meetings, and so on and so forth in a nested fashion. Four levels of nested 16-person councils, or three levels of nested 40-person councils, could encompass your entire 60,000-person city while locating ultimate decision-making power at the most general level. It's not about creating some parliamentarian apparatus of accountability, simply on a hugely expansive scale, but of building democracy and consensus-building into our social organisation at every level.
What would you classify as 'tedious, degrading work'? The first thing that came to mind is janitorial work, but I can't imagine janitors going away. People, by simple act of living and working in an area, are going to make a mess.
I mean most jobs most of the time, and almost all jobs some of the time. Almost all service and industrial work is hugely tedious and deeply dehumanising, a lot of administrative technical and clerical work isn't much better, and even a lot of professional work is being increasingly degraded.
Perhaps we haven't different standards of what constitutes degradation, but for me, the key is humanity, that your work allows you to be a person and not just a machine, not just a tool for fulfilling some mechanical end. My own job is relatively clean and physically un-demanding, but doing it requires that I be effectively incorporated into a mechanical, a particular set of sensors distinguished largely by the fact that they happen to be made of meat rather than metal. It makes me a
thing, and that is wrong.
Capitalism has managed to improve a lot of things about work, but it's never proven itself able to resolve. Workplaces get safer and cleaner, working conditions less torturous, and while this certainly improves the lot of workers, it does not empower them. Empowerment is always, ultimately, something workers
take, and the act of taking brings the entire nature of the wage-relation into question.
I'm still getting hung up on the last sentence. Perhaps I am small-minded and lack imagination, but I just can't envision how an anarchist society would work on a national scale*, let alone how it would be able to make life better than in a well-run social democracy. Perhaps I am an authoritarian at heart, but I am willing to trade direct participation** in major decisions for a relatively equitable, free***, and stable society.
I don't doubt it. Most people are; the sort of change I'm talking about is a hell of a gamble, and people are understandably reluctant to take that sort of change. In practice, so do I, which is why I prefer grumbling about my workplace to burning it down.
But it's not a given that equitable, free and stable capitalism is a viable option. Most of the time we struggle to achieve a meagre two out of three. I don't expect people to become revolutionaries because it is a good idea, but because they don't have any other option, because effectively pursuing their grievances within the existing social order has become impossible. At the same time, the peeling away of the old systems of authority changes people changes how they see themselves and their relationship with others, and changes what they expect from their lives, and a return to the old order becomes difficult to stomach. The standard example here is the workers' councils in 1917-19, entities which emerged not to carry out some grand revolutionary program, but to make concrete demands in the here and now- higher wages, less work, more rights, less discipline- and turned towards the revolutionary only when they found that as they achieved power, their demands grew more expansive, while at the same capital was less and less capable of meeting them.
Put simply but not inaccurately, I think that anarchism breaks out not when it
should, which is always, but when it
must and when it
can, which can't be determined.
To expand onn that, TF, how would you prevent the process of synoikismos/synoecism from happening again if a state of anarchy were achieved?
What's important to stress here is that anarchy is not simply a conclusion, not simply a great levelling, so what comes after is not simply a matter of trying to keep it all level. Anarchism is a revolution without an end-point, not simply the absence of control but the constant exceeding of controls, not simply people living without authority but of people living in such a fashion as to make authority impossible.
I'm not sure if this was asked before, but how would you provide essential security? Good will get us only so far after all. Maybe if we had a blank slate on another planet.
Security against what?
This is someplace where I have to disagree with Traitorfish. I think non-coersive authority, authority earned through admiration, respect, and the weight of words is a vital part of human existence and what we might term an "Anarchist society".
I think the problem we're hitting here is the ambiguity of the word "authority" in English. When I say authority, I'm meaning in the sense the power to control others, an authority which is exerted, rather than in the sense of status or respect. The latter is as you say necessary, and needs to be distinguished from the former; I think Bakunin said something about how deferring to the authority of the cobbler when it comes to repairing his shoes does not imply deferring to the authority of the king when it comes to running his life.
I again have to disagree with Traitorfish here, and go completely into the Christian end of Anarcho-Christianity, the idea that freedom and duty are opposites is one of the most common and problematic misunderstandings people have.
Our duty to our fellow man lifts us up, it completes us, it makes us free. The pursuit of personal desires traps us and enslaves us. Anarchy means freedom yes, and it does mean the freedom of coercion from others (if they practice it) and such, the sort of freedoms usually associated with political egalitarianism.
But the more important part, in my mind, is that it frees us from the need to coerce others. It frees us to exercise our duty to our fellow man. The modern state recognizes this duty but says you must only go so far in exercising it.
I honestly don't disagree, here- as you say, "freedom" does not have to be taken to mean "license", and I'm enough of a Kantian to think that any authentic freedom entails a tremendous degree of self-discipline. What I meant to suggest was that there exists a tension between our immediate duties to other and an individualistic ideal of absolute self-government, because at times out duties to others appear to oblige us to exercise control over them. I'm an anarchist
because I'm a communist, so I'm content to place duty over individualism, but I wanted to make it clear that this tension was present, and that I was aware of it, and to recognise that it's something we should aspire to overcome.
To me it seems like a lot of the anarchists are actually libertarians. So what is the difference between the two groups?
Libertarians do not object to the state or to the property, only to how they are currently organised in relationship to each other. Anarchisms are fundamentally opposed to both. Any apparent similarities they might posses apart from that are either superficial, of because of silly, uncritical anarchists (of which there are unfortunately plenty).
This has to come up on a discussion, but what about Somalia?
The absence of a state does not imply the absence of political authority.
