is one of the most common responses I get when I talk to people (usually liberals) about horizontal power structures. It comes down to some version of “Well, that sounds nice, but what about the bad actors?” I think the logic that follows from that fact is backwards. The standard response to this issue is to build vertical power structures. To appoint a ruling class that can supposedly “manage” the bad actors. But this ignores the obvious: vertical power structures are magnets for narcissists. They don’t neutralize those people. They empower them. They give them legitimacy and insulation from consequences. They concentrate power precisely where it’s most dangerous. Horizontal societies have always had ways of handling antisocial behavior. (Highly recommend Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm. He studied hundreds of forager societies, overall done amazing work.) Exile, public shaming, revocable leadership, and distributed decision-making all worked and often worked better than what we do now. Pre-civilized societies didn’t let power-hungry individuals take over. They stopped them. We used to know how to deal with bad actors. The idea of a “power vacuum” only makes sense if you believe power must be held at the top. If you diffuse power horizontally, there is no vacuum to fill. There’s just shared responsibility. That may feel unfamiliar, but it’s not impossible. We’ve done it before. Most of human history was built on it. The real question isn’t whether bad actors exist. It’s how we choose to deal with them. Do we build systems that make it harder for them to dominate others, or ones that practically roll out the red carpet? I think this opens up a more useful conversation.
What if we started seriously discussing tactics for dealing with domination-seeking behavior?
What mechanisms help us identify and isolate that kind of behavior without reproducing the same old coercive structures?
How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?
I’d love to hear your guys’ thoughts.
Bad actors are going to build their vertical power structures whether you like it or not. This is the challenge liberals are posing to anarchists: if you are unwilling to build your own vertical power structure then how do you stop the bad actors from building theirs and then using it as a cudgel against you?
Exile and public shaming are tools that only work against bad actors as individuals. They do not work when the bad actors team up and form a critical mass.
In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength. The agricultural revolution changed all this because of food storage and the potential for an outside group to attack and steal the food. People formed power structures and developed the first militaries in order to defend their granaries and this led to the growth of large cities where people no longer had the ability to know everyone.
Militaries also showed the power of hierarchies. Making decisions by consensus is slow. A military with a formal power structure has a huge advantage in combat against an unstructured tribe of warriors. This was proven again and again as the empires of the past conquered their neighbours.
But I digress. A large city where it’s impossible to know everyone is a huge problem for anarchists who want to prevent bad actors from forming a vertical power structure and taking over. There simply is no known social tool which can combat against the formation of conspiracies and elites within a large society.
In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength.
Sure they did - in the form of their own neighboring state. Then they invaded your peaceful anarchist society and you are now the great-great-great-(great…) descendant of their rape.
It sucks but you’re absolutely right. Read Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. The only way anarchism worked in that story was on an entirely separate planet that everyone agreed to leave alone because it was a fucking desert and not worth conquering.
I meant distant past before statehood was even a thing. That was before agriculture when all people lived in nomadic tribes. There were no neighbouring states because no one had fixed territories. Groups still fought among each other as they tracked the movement of migratory herds (mobile food supply) but there were no raids on granaries because there were no granaries yet.
The first agricultural societies had a really bad time. Their nutrition was extremely poor compared to the meat-rich diets of nomads. The nomads with their superior health and mobility had easy pickings on the crude granaries and poor defences of early farming villages. Statehood began when those villages began to work together and start their own militaries which led to specialized soldiers for the first time (as opposed to nomadic warriors who fought but also hunted and parented and everything else their tribe needed them to do).
Personally this is why I’m a libertarian minarchist and not an anarchist. Ultimately, I do feel that there will always be people working against the collective effort of the betterment of society and instead of long term community progress they favor short-term personal gains. Having a minimal cooperative-based government that is allowed to hold a monopoly on violence is preferable to vigilanteism. The issue is who watches the watchers.
You’re making the exact same argument OP is talking about.
Yes but op’s decision is that because bad people could take positions of power. There should be no positions of power which doesn’t correct the original issue. Op stated that bad people will do bad things and abuse other people. So we can let those bad people run amok or we can make an effort to police their actions which will ultimately give some of those bad people and additional level of power.
Do you have anywhere to do further reading?
I would advise you to read. John Locke’s political treaties as well as David Henry Thoreaus essays
Thank you. I’ll check them out. I’ve read a small amount of locke’s work but definitely need to read more of it.
Anarchists can have means of governing themselves – it’s not a big free-for all. The point is that there is no central hierarchy. For example, an anarchist collective could decide (via whatever method, that’s a separate convo) that each community member gets to use a piece of equipment one week per year, or that the community as a whole will operate that equipment to satisfy the needs of people in a mutually-decided order. They could also decide that the 20 electrical engineers among them should as a group have operational control on a day-to-day basis of the power generating infrastructure, but only as long as they operate it according to the expressed needs of the community, in the community’s interest, in a safe way.
None of that would be hierarchy or domination, as long as the underlying decision making process was democratic.
I personally don’t think I’m very much in favor of a nightwatch state. I have to admit though, I’m not much learned in the field of “minarchism.” I still strongly believe any centralized power is in danger of corruption.
Even with hierarchies of mutual aid, you end up with different tasks allocated to different people. Oh joel does bin duty because it’s easiest for him for x y z reasons. Okay, Joel becomes bin guy. May even get stuck in that role. Ect ect… Eventually taken for granted. An unintentional hierarchy appears from horizontal power structures.
By the way, dandies were usually children of wealth, and their outfits went on to become some of the first business suits.
It’s tough to do anti-hierarchical practices in a hierarchical world! I’ve seen organizations have rotating roles that make sure people don’t get stuck.
Does Joel dislike being the bin guy? He could just stop doing it.
Is Joel doing a shitty job with the bins? Anyone could start doing it, even if he protests.
I don’t see the problem.
Joel is the kind of anarchist who thinks he has a right to do a shitty job in protest, says they’re just bins. No one else wants the job. Joel says he’ll keep doing it out of an uncomfortable feeling of obligation. Sometimes at the Friday night drinking session, others make fun of him and he plays along enough to not cause a scene but it’s really upsetting him.
They should all grow the fuck up. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who would rather play passive-aggressive games than sort the situation.
I’m not sure how this relates to the practical functionality of anarchy. How is the bin situation bettered under a governmental system?
Yup! Humans being imperfect is an argument against hierarchical power structures. How can we keep a few narcissists, bad actors, or even well-meaning but mistaken folks from causing bad outcomes for society? By getting rid of their ability to wield power. If you believe that power corrupts, then the answer to that is to distribute it so evenly and thinly that no one can accumulate institutional power. That’s why bottom-up decision making methods are better than top-down ones.
Unfortunately, lots of hierarchical systems are built into the fabric of our societies. Capitalism is a big one. Private property is an even more foundational one. Various kinds of bigotry rest on those systems. The authoritarian state will take whatever excuse it can (religious justifications, property-protection justifications, enemies-at-the-gates justifications, etc) to exercise power over society. So our struggle should ultimately be aimed at those things.
Finding ways to (1) give people the time, material security, and consciousness to organize together to change their lives for the better (tenant unions, labor unions, community-run non-police safety programs, etc); (2) decommodify essentials like food, shelter, clothing, etc; and (3) help populations learn to govern themselves at the local level and federate with others; would all go a very long way.
Look for lessons from existing and recent struggles. Anarchist Spain, the Zapatistas, and others have much to teach us.
Yeah. That’s always been such a strange contradiction in their beliefs. “People can’t be trusted with power, so that’s why we need a system that empowers the absolute worst people!” Setting aside how wrong that belief is, the conclusion doesn’t even logically follow from the incorrect “fact.”
As for how we handle things in the future… idk. You’re right that people have methods of socially dealing with bad behavior, but I also wonder if we can reliably transplant the experiences of pre-industrial societies into our modern world. As technology progresses, it becomes easier and easier for smaller and smaller groups of people to inflict harm on others. In the past, if you wanted to go fight a war you needed to convince a whole army’s worth of people to go risk their lives and hurt others. Now? A handful of people in an air conditioned room can level a building on the other side of the world without ever getting up out of their chairs thanks to drones. Not only do you need to convince fewer people, they’re also more isolated from both the risk and horror of their actions, so it’s easier to convince them.
I don’t think it’s that plausible to deal with those kinds of problems through social pressure alone. What to do about it? Idk.
No yea, you’re obviously right. We can’t just take forager social praxis and use it in our society, but we can absolutely learn from them. You have to understand that social pressure goes a lot further than just ostracizing an individual. Humans need eachother, more often than not. We feed eachother, fix eachothers plumbing, teach each-others children how to garden, how to fix stuff. Let’s say there is a group of individuals causing destruction (using drones). Well we’ve acknowledged they’re doing terrible shit, so we stop helping them and we make it clear to the rest of the community what these people are doing. In extreme cases we’d have to deal with the situation violently, but it’s equally as important to recognize that when we’re talking about bad actors in general, we’re talking about bad actors in all of its spectrum. From pickpockets, to murders. And I think for each case there is a solution.
The question that comes to my mind is, “Who’s ‘we’, Kimosabe?” (It’s the punchline of a joke.)
In the drone example, half of the community acknowledges that the operators are doing terrible shit. The other half of the community things it’s fantastic. What then? The half that deplores the killing isn’t likely to do much about it, because the killing is happening to somebody else on the other side of the world. If they try to stop it violently, the killing will start happening to them.
I really shouldn’t, but I’m gonna take on your hypothetical situation where half of the community is fine with destroying another community.
First, if half of any community supports mass violence, that’s a crisis of values, not a failure of anarchism. An anarchist society wouldn’t have drones or the infrastructure for such violence in the first place. Those things thrive on centralization and detachment.
But alright, let’s say it happens anyway. If half supports the violence, the other half would organize, resist, and dismantle the structures enabling it. It wouldn’t be easy, but that’s the point of horizontal power. No one person or group has the unchecked ability to destroy at scale.
In the end, the problem isn’t lack of control, it’s a broken culture that normalizes cruelty. Anarchism doesn’t guarantee peace, but it prevents that violence from becoming institutionalized and detached from consequences.
I’m not trying for a ‘gotcha’. I really would like for horizontal power structures to work. I’m fascinated by systems in which an orderly outcome can be achieved without any centralized control by the individual agents each following a simple set of rules, e.g. sidewalks and roads (mostly) function well on a mass scale with entirely autonomous agents. I try to envision sets of rules like that at work, or in the club I’m in. These kinds of systems work because the incentives line up: The community is better off when everybody follows the rules, and the individual is better off by following the rules.
Indeed, if half of a community cheers on violence, it’s not a failure of anarchism. However, it’s a real scenario, and if anarchism is to work in the real world, it has to handle such situations. And such a scenario is not at all hypothetical, it’s just a simplification of the political situation that we find ourselves in the United States in right now. The half of the population that deplores violence, or fascism, is trying to organize, resist, and dismantle the power structures enabling it, but there’s only so much we’re willing to do. The incentive structure is not aligned. To make the community better off, individuals would have to make themselves much, much worse off. Unless, of course, everybody participated, like a massive game of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
So what is the answer from anarchism? How do we stop the people who don’t think like us, and want to hurt us, or at least wouldn’t mind?
I’m not saying that they can’t. However, I think your definition of centralization and mine must vary. Appointing a committee in my book is centralization and thus minarchism.
‘Minarchism’ in my book is a term invented by fascist and capitalist entryists, and people who use it to gatekeep anarchism should be on the other side of the gate.
They don’t need to be ‘appointed’ by a king or politician in order to exist. Committees are one of the essential organs of actual right-now functioning real-life working large-scale anarchist groups. When done well, they include the voices of all of the significant stakeholders in a decision, and efficiently discover solutions that achieve the goal while respecting the autonomy and interests of all of the participants.
Don’t @ me, but definitely reply to @JustJack23@slrpnk.net with the disemboweled anarchism you propose as an alternative.
I think you should slow down and critically read the words that I wrote. You should probably also read into natural philosophy.
I have no problem with the no Gods no Kings no Masters point of view. I would count a committee as a master. I guess we’re my worldview and your splits is you seem to think that the committee can do no wrong.
Even if a committee is temporary, based on solving a problem and with perfect representation of the underlying community? (Hypothetically of course)
How is that a masters? Also I would love to hear what better solution do you propose?
That is very interesting, what alternative do you propose?
Might makes right is always the problem, whether you’re talking about anarchy, or hierarchy, or some kind of distributed system - some actor will use force to inflict harm for their own benefit (in contrast to inflicting harm to defend others). I believe the study of human history tells us that this always happens, it is not preventable. So the question becomes, how do we build systems that can protect people from harm without concentrating power that may itself be abused?
- Expecting everyone to protect themselves is not a viable option. That way lies barbarism, where the weak are left to perish.
- I’m very open to ideas about resisting force with something other than equivalent force, but I’m not sure what that would actually look like in practice. What do you do when the bandits show up in town and start shooting and looting, other than shoot back?
If you diffuse power horizontally, there is no vacuum to fill. There’s just shared responsibility.
I’ll just point out, this was the original concept behind the US Constitution. Whether it’s worked as intended is… debatable.
We keep us safe. Defense against bad actors is everyone’s resposibility. The kid who runs off with the ball doesn’t get invited to play anymore. I don’t know where the idea anarchists are pascifist comes from, but the answer is shoot back. No Gods, no masters.
I’ll just point out, this was the original concept behind the US Constitution. Whether it’s worked as intended is… debatable.
A quick note on the U.S. Constitution: it’s sometimes framed as an attempt to diffuse power horizontally, but that’s not really accurate. The U.S. already had a decentralized system at the time, the Articles of Confederation. And the Constitution was created explicitly to centralize federal power in response to elite fears of uprisings like Shays’ Rebellion. It didn’t introduce shared responsibility; it replaced a fragile form of it with a much stronger central government.
So while it may have used the language of distributed power (checks and balances, separation of powers, etc.), it wasn’t about horizontalism in the sense that I meant. It was about stabilizing and legitimizing state authority which is a very different project.
Regarding your question: What would we do when bandits show up in a town and start shooting and looting, other than shoot back?
…Realistically, I don’t believe we wouldn’t shoot back. But in my eyes that’s already an extreme case of power concentrating, which I firmly believe is preventable before it even occurs. When violence does erupt, collective defense is necessary. But the difference is whether we wait until that crisis point (where power has already centralized in dangerous hands) or whether we create resilient, horizontal networks that make it far harder for any one group or individual to monopolize force and exploit others.
So yes, we defend ourselves when necessary, but the real work is done long before the shooting starts.
Edit: The goal is to build social systems that reduce the conditions enabling those “bandits” to emerge in the first place. Through strong community bonds, mutual aid, shared responsibility, and mechanisms for accountability that keep narcissistic or violent individuals from gaining influence or forming armed factions.
How do horizontal power structures handle problems of global scale? The COVID pandemic and how people behaved and created consequences for others comes to mind. I’m not sure if any of the tactics you mention would work. You can’t shame people who think they’re doing the right thing, can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them, they have no leadership to revoke, and I’m not sure how distributed decision making would apply.
Another idea on that scale might be best exemplified by climate change (or pfas etc). Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?
If anybody is going to answer, I’d appreciate it greatly if the answer did not compare how much worse vertical systems are for these problems. If you can give me a novel idea about this, I’d appreciate it.
not gonna get fully into the weeds here but ‘have no leadership to revoke’ is an odd point to try and make when the covid disinfo campaign absolutely had leadership.
How do horizontal power structures handle problems of global scale? The COVID pandemic and how people behaved and created consequences for others comes to mind.
Horizontal power structures can only be stable if people have a healthy culture of proactively fighting selfish actions. Any teenager will have experienced students firing their teachers, the village taking children away from abusive parents, women going on a sex strike to get men to take allegations of catcalling seriously, etc.
So when COVID rolls around and some people act selfishly, people already know from experience how to act with it. People are already familiar with shunning friends because they refuse to grow out of hurting others, they’re already familiar with boycotting specific businesses and finding alternatives. And most importantly, people already know that all of this is waiting for them if they do choose to be selfish, so they are way more likely to choose the right thing from the start.
Ideally, horizontal power structures also come with Restorative Justice. For every crime that people have ever heard of, they’ll have seen the process of someone being kept at a safe distance until they learn why they were wrong and make amends to those they wronged, and receiving help with learning.
But sure, suppose somehow that 40% of the population doesn’t really care much about keeping each other healthy and is not going to budge without consequences. In that case: Making people sick is an act of violence, so people would be in their rights to use the threat of reciprocal violence to keep people that refuse to wear masks at 2m distance.
This would be a problem that needs discussion. My fifteen minute answer would be that those of the 60% that feel comfortable with it could be given consent by the community to walk around with 2m long halberds (shaped to be blunt when poking and sharp when slicing) and keep the 40% out of spaces where they would cause harm with the threat of force. They could share a digital zine on how to make these halberds from common household materials, and have the normal justice system for people that misuse those weapons.
can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them
If you can’t find twenty people to work together to overpower and exile one person, that’s a good sign that you’re wrong about wanting to exile them.
Another idea on that scale might be best exemplified by climate change (or pfas etc). Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?
In a horizontal power structure, a nation disregarding the agreed-on CO2 output norms is the same thing as a person disagreeing the agreed-on “no catcalling” norms. Talking to them, boycotting them, using violence if necessary. If the USA and EU didn’t have a position of power over the rest of the world, their excess CO2 production would be answered with a boycott from the rest of the world.
The willfully negligent poisoning of others is also an act of violence. People who do not understand that reckless scientific experimentation or deployment of untested chemicals is murder can be stopped by any means up to and including violence. In a horizontal power structure, every Chemours factory would be carefully decontaminated rubble.
Though more realistically, Chemours would never have existed. There would not be a patent on PFAS. People would treat those that deploy PFAS without prior study on its health effects as violent. People would discover its toxicity and environmental harm within years of its discovery and before any large-scale roll-out, and the cleanup of contaminated sites would be manageable by volunteers.
I’m curious if you agree that police not providing protection to Italian immigrants in the US in the late 19th century caused the Mafia to be created to fill that need.
I’m not saying cops are good, but most of the anarchists I’ve spoken to have the idea that it would be great for everybody to be willing to be violent with others when disagreements arise.
Maybe I can find twenty people to exile someone, but what if they can find forty to protect themselves? Does that make one group more right than the other? I also think that finding 20 people who agree with you makes you think there’s merit to your position and justification for violence is an absolutely terrifyingly low bar.
If you can give me a novel idea about this, I’d appreciate it.
Change the select few decisionmakers regularly. With dice, not an expensive and polarizing campaign followed by elections. (Note: creates incentive to educate everyone well, since they could be chosen at random.)
Education of everyone doesn’t mean any individual can make informed decisions even on their own health let alone understand the chemistry and impact of PFAS, for example. But I do agree there’s something to the idea of removing incentives to campaign.
Oh, I didn’t try to shame anyone. Apologies if it looked like it. To answer your question:
Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?
My answer to that would be: In order for horizontal power, we need to radically rethink how people are connected to each other in the first place. The root issue here isn’t that decentralized systems can’t coordinate, it’s that they require a different kind of infrastructure to do it. In a pandemic scenario, that could look like local health councils making decisions based on conditions on the ground, real-time, open data-sharing across regions, resource pooling to get masks, meds, or food where they’re needed and ideally cultural norm of collective care (not just individual freedom).
On the climate front, it’s obviously more complex, but the same principles apply. If people are embedded in local systems of stewardship where the land and water is shared and monitored by the people who depend on them, you’re much more likely to see sustainable behavior. And if those communities are networked across bioregions, then broader ecological decisions can be coordinated without a single coercive authority calling the shots.
I’m not saying any of this is easy, especially from where we are now. But I don’t think we need to scale control to meet global crises. I think we need to scale cooperation and that’s where horizontal system actually have a chance to shine.
I understand it would take radically different structures, but in the pandemic example, what happens when the next local group decides to not participate in mutual care? Could it still work without magically making humans better than they are?
I believe most people aren’t bad actors. But also, most people can see what is good for them. And cooperatives prove that people can run with it to their advantage.
David Graeber made a very good point that the concept of money is only necessary for war. Take money out of the equation and the next local group will have to stretch to avoid mutual care.
most people can see what’s good for them
Counterpoints: smoking and other addictions, results of recent US election, propaganda and advertising working
As for money, it’s a technology that can act as a value store. I don’t think getting rid of it is a realistic idea until we’ve got Star Trek levels of tech.
in the pandemic example, what happens when the next local group decides to not participate in mutual care?
Some entire countries essentially did that. They responded carelessly and slow, and experienced harsher consequences as a result. Nobody can stop a group of people from getting themselves hurt. Sure, one can try to help them once they are hurt, if some resources remain available for that.
I guess my point is not that groups can harm themselves, but that they can (and did) harm others in this particular scenario.
Do you feel current systems of governance are handling these global collective action problems well? Because I do not. I think they’re just very difficult and thorny problems that we’ll always have to wrestle with.
I just don’t think that current systems being meh means that any given other system has merit. That’s why I mentioned not comparing in my comment.
I think the main advantage of anarchism and adjacent systems is better local governance and personal freedom. But I’m not really convinced that means global governance would be worse. If anything, disarming the global superpowers would improve international solidarity since different autonomous groups could more effectively reach agreements for the common good rather than being bullied into doing harmful things by the powerful. This would make the anarchist-UN potentially much more effective than it is now. Otherwise, I don’t think it would be too different than the way international orgs work now plus some additional norms and structures to avoid bullying and encourage consensus.
But my point is just that not having a clear solution for this specific problem isn’t a reason against these ideas. These issues are some of the most difficult to solve and I’d rather focus on low-hanging fruit first.
I don’t deny that these are difficult problems, and I won’t attempt to address everything that you mention, but “can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them” isn’t true. The use of force doesn’t require any sort of formal vertical power structure. Problems of global scale are just combinations of many individual actions at the local scale, and at the local scale, if someone is committing violence or endangering others, all it takes is a few concerned people to team up and remove them using whatever force needed. Firearms help, but even those are not strictly necessary. If such problems are addressed quickly enough at the local level, then they are less likely to scale up to the global level in any organised way. If many people are already committing violence together on a larger scale, then removing them becomes a matter of tribal warfare or genocide. Ugly, and not something that I recommend, but far from impossible, as history has shown.
Firearms help
Firearms allow an individual to commit mass murder before a a bunch of good guys are even aware of it. There’s a bunch of ways individuals can have way more destructive power than is reasonable. I’m not saying a vertical power structure is required, just that I still don’t see how a horizontal one can deal with destructive individuals or provide safety without most people being willing to kill other humans, maintain the many skills that would require, and have a mindset where being constantly vigilant doesn’t cause some sort of mental issues. If it’s just a problem that’s doesn’t currently have a solution, that’s fine. I tend to agree with Nozick that it just creates competing and escalating defense groups until one comes out on top. And if we’re going to agree that humans are bad enough to avoid providing them with vertical power structures, we absolutely cannot wave away that people would behave any better under any other system.
Maybe we’re using different definitions of exile. As I know it, in means physically kicking them out of an area and its social structure. I can imagine heavy resistance to that. If it’s just cutting somebody off from systems, I really don’t see the difference between killing somebody with violence vs starving them or similar. If it’s just ostracizing them, I don’t see how a social punishment is a deterrent to antisocial behavior.
As for global problems just requiring concerned individuals to use force, I can’t imagine a few individuals forcing the whole world off fossil fuels, for example.
I would love to live in a society that is set up this way. I saw a recent study about inequality challenging the conventional wisdom that it is inevitable, here on lemmy actually. Dunno if thats one of the reasons for this post. But I certainly think its worth asking is the way we do things now the best way? Probably not, just because we do stuff the way we do now doesn’t mean it must be done that way. I personally am in favor of governments where the responsibility is given to small groups of people who rotate into positions for some length of time. It would just be randomly chosen people from society at large. It’s been done in the past, and it seems like a great way to keep a small group from concentrating power and misusing it. Also makes it so ordinary people are making the decisions, so less likely to make malaligned choices that are bad for the rest of society. Whether that is a flat structure, or a vertical structure is certainly up for debate.
There’s also always people willing to fix it for others too
To preface, I’m a Marxist and not an Anarchist, our frameworks differ substantially.
I agree that “but what about bad actors” criticism is quite bad, but for different reasons. They don’t “spawn in” out of nowhere and ruin systems, the opposite is the case - it’s the system that produces them through inequalities, ideology and reward mechanisms. Capitalism rewards antisocial, domineering behavior because competition, capital and power accumulation demands it in order to “be successful”. This is something inherent to the system and its structures, not something you can fix simply by moral policing, so focusing just on the individual is a mistake.
The vertical power structures like the state aren’t there merely for individual power hoarding, but rather it’s a structure of class domination - the bourgeoisie control over proletariat. Enforcement and protection of private property (such as factories/company offices/other means of production), legal systems controlling who gets into power and what they can change, education and media promoting the status quo are but a few examples of this. The state isn’t merely there to preserve itself, it’s there to preserve the capitalist system.
To touch up on some of your questions you have at the bottom, and be warned that this will be somewhat anti-anarchistic:
After a successful revolution, bourgeoisie fall and people cheer in the streets. What now, do we go full horizontal hierarchy mode and decentralize? The truth of the matter is that post-revolutionary period is incredibly volatile (as seen by the fact that most revolutions happened in cascades) and faces a multitude of immediate issues, such as: 1. The previous ruling class trying to get themselves back into power again via counter-revolution or armed uprisings using their resources and connections, be it foreign or internal. 2. The need to overcome capitalist commodity production and reorganize it into planned production to satisfy human and economic needs (aka socialist mode of production). 3. Defense against foreign capitalist threats who would love to get more land/resources or major political influence via coup. 4. The need to spread the revolution internationally, as a country that doesn’t operate under capitalist mode of production simply cannot survive in a global capitalist world (can elaborate on this if anyone cares, don’t want this wall of text to be too long).
Decentralized horizontal systems are quite detrimental when it comes to solving these immediate issues - it fragments authority, decision making, delays responses to armed insurrections, foreign invasions and production reorganization. You need quick, decisive action during a revolutionary period or collapse follows even before “bad actors” become a problem.
The working class must seize state power - whether through a vanguard party, council republic, or equivalent to suppress the bourgeoisie, defend the revolution, and transition from capitalist commodity production towards planned economies to satisfy needs. Of course, the state must fulfill the immediate goals to no longer become necessary and for the state to wither away in a timely manner - else, and I agree with Anarchists here, the revolution will degenerate (into red bourgeois states) usually with the help of ‘bad actors’, as seen with USSR and China.
Also as a short addendum, comparing societies of today to primitive egalitarian horizontal societies is an error - these societies operated under radically different productive forces, population scales and social complexity, production was localized and individualistic. Today’s production is inherently social, large-scale and global, requiring entirely different forms of coordination and past forms simply cannot be revived or even be compared.
Very good and complete answer as usually, that said this is one of my main problems with left ideologies that think hierarchies are necessary even for a limited time, the people in power like to stay it power. As the saying goes:
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have strong doubts that the people in charge will just give up power once it comes to that, and sadly most experiments with communism/socialism (in Eurasian at least) lead exactly to that.
Yeah, this is one of the differences between anarchists and communists I doubt we’d ever find agreement on due to the nature of our views. Anarchists reject the notion of power altogether, while Marxists don’t deny that power can entrench itself but attempts to explain why and under what historical and material conditions it can be overcome.
I have strong doubts that the people in charge will just give up power once it comes to that, and sadly most experiments with communism/socialism (in Eurasian at least) lead exactly to that.
To be clear, my intention isn’t to defend the past socialist experiments as seen in my original comment, but using them as examples where people in charge refused to give up power misunderstands theory and history. The countries were never in position to “give up power”, as they didn’t ever reach a point where state became unnecessary, and there are reasons for that.
If you look at a country like post-revolution USSR, the country was agrarian with vast peasant majority. The productive forces were far from developed to properly transition into socialist mode of production and meet everyone’s needs, which is one of the purposes of the centralized state, and this is something that would have taken a really long time given their productive capacity. Lenin and Bolsheviks did try to go for an international revolution angle in hopes they would escape this predicament, but they failed, leaving USSR isolated, forcing it to adopt capitalist markets and then quickly degenerating due to opportunism and the ‘bad actors’ the system inevitably creates over time as leadership changes.
Marxists such as myself would argue that USSR was doomed from the start due to their material conditions at the time unless they could have found success internationally. This is something that Anarchism wouldn’t resolve - decentralization in an undeveloped, isolated and hostile environment would weaken defense, cripple the development of productive forces and very likely would have lead to an accelerated collapse.
Also apologies - I can’t help but write unreadable walls of text.
I do see your point, and I can’t argue that so far communists have greater success in creating and maintaining states against outside influence be it economic or military.
No need to apologize for the walls they are well structured.
It comes down to some version of “Well, that sounds nice, but what about the bad actors?”
I have encountered the same. One avenue of argumentation that typically follows is “but we needs cops because there’s crime” -> “crime can be reduced with social policy, without cops” -> “but never to zero” -> “but cop duties needn’t be a person’s career”.
Next comes politics. The political system where I live is a parliamentary republic with proportional elections. Compared to volatile cases (e.g. presidential two-party system) it is fairly slow. Risk of takeover by a bad actor is not perceived as high. Anarchist critique fails to get attention.
I have also encountered the argument: “if we decentralize, we [insert national indentity] step too far down the organizational ladder [of ability to mobilize resources fast], and become possible to conquer”. People perceive that a stateless area or low-intensity state would be an invitation for the nearest highly invasive state. They also fear that change would cause weakness, which would be exploited. Thus, a foreign state becomes a justification for the local state. Sadly I must admit that the reasoning is not without merit.
My responses have typically been:
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leaders wanting to return to power are a problem for democracy
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playing voter groups against each other causes long-term problems (degrades cooperation)
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electoral democracy inherently favours wealthy individuals (campaign expenses)
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decentralization protects against takeover and decapitation strike
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authoritarian takeover of local state has happened already once, with tragic results
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party politicans have for decades failed to enact simple, popular measures (e.g. progressive income tax)
My suggestion to a statist person typically ends up being “at least, try sortition”. Which is laughably hard, since it would require a rewrite of the constitution, and parties agreeing to a measure that pushes them into history books. :)
I can convincingly argue that sortition reduces the sway that elites hold over policy, and makes equalizing policy measures easier to pass. But it keeps the number of politicians small and leaves the door open for acting fast (e.g. in case of military threat).
Meanwhile, I would appreciate if mainstreamers left anarchists on their own to experiment with more. Especially in the economy.
P.S. Ultimately, I fear that anarchist society can be only planted on the ruins of a state. The niche must have been emptied by a catastrophic event (and it’s ethically wrong to cause one). However, it’s not wrong to do what’s right when others have done wrong. One should know that catastrophic events increase people’s desire to have stability and order. So there must be a type of anarchy that can quickly deliver freedom + equality + stability + order. That’s a pretty tall list, which is why it typically doesn’t happen.
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Pre-civilized societies didn’t let power-hungry individuals take over.
Pre-civilized societies were small.
The real question isn’t whether bad actors exist. It’s how we choose to deal with them. Do we build systems that make it harder for them to dominate others, or ones that practically roll out the red carpet?
This seems like a misunderstanding to me. The people don’t build systems. The people are subjected to systems built by dominating bad actors.
In my personal experience it really depend on what you are trying to build but most of the time it ends in the party/collective/space expelling the person from it. What can make this process less dramatic and damaging is the organizational culture you have in the space or the party. For example, in the organization that i´m part of when we reunite, all men are required to help in some domestic(cleaning, cooking or preparing the room for the meeting) and organizing(taking notes on the meeting/discussion, being the mediator of the meeting/discussion[1] and so on) task because we have perceived that this is a way to make the woman in the organization participate more actively in the discussions and we as an organization want them to participate more on these discussions. So we have a culture of doing that and for some time it has been a self-reinforcing thing. So if i stopped doing it, my comrades would call my attention to it and if i really took a stand against it, i would probably be kicked out of the organization. My hypothetical exit would galvanize no one because we have been doing this specific thing for a long time and everybody agrees that we should keep doing it.
In short: I don´t have a definitive answer but a good guess would be organizational culture. We, humans are very social species and take a lot of cues from the people around us and if we are able to create a good organizational culture in a space/party/collective people will mostly follow it. That said,it is hard to create a good organizational culture, people in the org or the space really need to want to make it happen but once it is create it is easier(or less harder) to keep.
[1] Counting and signaling the time that one has to speak, keeping the meeting on track, etc.
Man, people are so fatalistic and utopian in their world views. The fact is that we are beautiful, wretched, capable creatures, and life is a fight. People are gonna beat you down, and the world is gonna shit all over you. Whether we’re watching people do their fucking war games and playing monopoly with the world, we rise up and punch a bitch in the face when he fucks with us. Anarchism is a way of being, and we’re clever as fuck. We’re gonna work this shit out and jump over hurdles and get into ugly arguments and love our family right. We can convolute this shit and try to work out the fantasy worlds we would love to live in - at the end of the day, we try to fill our bellies and be loved. And 9 times out of ten, you’re not arguing with the world, you’re failing to confront yourself. How do prevent hierarchy? We fucking stand up to bullies, protect ourselves, and treat our women right. Feel me?
