I was being pithy. I think it’s a bit absurd to say that corruption is impossible under anarchism because no one has power.
Power disparity is an unavoidable fact in every society, no matter the structure (or lack thereof). Some will be popular and some unpopular. Some will be physically strong and others physically weak. Some will seek to build up community and some will seek to tear it down.
And any amount of power disparity is prone to corruption. Surely I don’t need to point out examples of an absolute asshole getting popular and then using that popularity to take advantage of or hurt other people.
Anarchism, if it has one thing going for it, is that these problems tend to stay fairly local. But it also doesn’t give any solutions to these problems other than lynchmobs. So its a bit of a tradeoff. But it absolutely isn’t immune from corruption.
Well, technically it is immune to corruption. It isn’t immune to people being terrible and exploitative, but that’s technically not corruption. To be corrupt, you’d have to be given legitimate power, and then misuse it. The popular asshole created their power from scratch.
A system without legitimized power isn’t immune to bad people creating power, but it is technically immune to corruption since there’s nothing to corrupt.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a system without some form of legitimized power, as people will always fill that vacuum. There will be a village elder or judge or peacekeeper or something, as those all fulfill necessary elements to a functioning society, and they will all come with some amount of legitimate authority.
Now, I suppose it might be fair to say that those “legitimate authorities” aren’t prescribed by the system, and therefore any corruption that follows is not the fault of the system. That seems a bit squishy to me, as those “legitimate authorities” are a natural outflow of society, and if the system does not have built in controls on those positions it is tacitly approving of any corruption.
But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.
Anarchism is not the lack of government. It’s the lack of hierarchy. There can (and practically must) still be government and cooperation. Anarchism is not chaos, like the media portrays it.
There’s a lot of resources online if you want to learn more.
I didn’t find anarchic rhetoric to be very compelling because it seems like endless layers of “Actually,”, not unlike libertarianism. We wind up reinventing the thing discarded.
I’m a systems guy. When I have conversations with politically idealistic individuals, I ask them questions about their proposed system. Every anarchist I talk to at length about infrastructure and industry either refuses to imagine that people wouldn’t spontaneously cooperate out of the goodness of their hearts, or winds up reinventing hierarchies. But different hierarchies, which aren’t the same things for some reason.
I’m also a systems guy. It isn’t that people will spontaneously cooperate and just build roads or whatever. It’s about creating systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices. Yes, there will be disagreement on some things, but the solution with the most agreement will be enacted.
Also yes, not everyone can be involved in everything, so you need groups in charge of certain tasks. However, again, this does not need to be hierarchical. It just needs to be cooperative. Those groups will handle those tasks, and they’re accountable to the people. They aren’t above them. They’re just filling a role for now, as everyone is also doing.
I thought the same thing as you about anarchism for a while too. I thought it seemed stupid and that it couldn’t work, and they’re just reinventing the same things with different names. I don’t believe that anymore though. It turns out the structures we have in place lead us to a very poor understanding of alternative systems of governance, for some very mystifying reason.
I’m not even specifically talking about systems of governance, just systems of decision and production.
It’s about creating systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices.
How, tho? Once we get into the nitty gritty of implementation, how do you build that system? How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?
This is what I’m talking about. You either have to assume that in an anarchist utopia, greed and malice will somehow spontaneously disappear from all humanity, or you have to have to devise a way to handle that.
Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.
The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing
systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices. Yes, there will be disagreement on some things, but the solution with the most agreement will be enacted.
It turns out that getting parasocial apex predators to coexist peacefully is actually pretty difficult, and every system has to make compromises. I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.
How, tho?.. How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?
Have you heard of Community Policing before? That’s an example of non-hierarchical cooperative policing, and it’s effective all over the world. I don’t know if you’re trying to be obtuse or just really haven’t heard or thought about any of this, but it isn’t anything particularly revolutionary.
Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.
I talked about this above. Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing
Absolutely, and they should be treated as human as anyone. They weren’t flawless gods. They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now. Hell, they threw out their first attempt in a few years (The Articles of Confederation). We should be inspired by their attempt and actions and try to fix the issues we can see in the current systems. That’s could mean starting over, like they did… twice.
I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
Anarchism has been a philosophy for hundreds of years. There’s solutions to everything you’ve presented, and probably anything you could think of. Being ignorant of something isn’t the same thing as it not existing. It just means you don’t know about it yet. If you made a sincere attempt to understand Anarchist philosophy and though, and different forms of Anarchism, and they’re solutions, you wouldn’t be so confused. You don’t have to do this, but if you’re actually curious you should.
I have. In actual implementation, it’s still hierarchical, it just encourages outreach and communication between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
We already have accountability and cooperation through democratic elections. If you think that’s insufficient, that’s a valid critique, but not in itself a replacement. That’s the sticking point, developing a replacement that doesn’t fall to the same problems of the current system.
You said you’re a systems person. Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one? So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent. Building a stable system with effective checks and balances is much more difficult than anarchist literature suggests. And even if you do make a system that starts off stable, it’s only a matter of time before people figure out a way to exploit the system.
You can have a system that’s democratic, responsive, or just. But you can’t have all three, they are functionally at odds with one another. You can design a system that appears to be all three, but implementation will expose the design flaws sooner or later.
They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now
I doubt it. I believe they expected we’d change the system they built, and I agree that we should, but the foundation is pretty difficult to improve upon. Not saying it’s perfect, but pragmatically it’s fairly practical. If anything, it suffers mostly from the charges we’ve made to it; capping the House and Citizens United have been particularly damaging changes.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
I respectfully disagree. Sure, solutions are considered, but not really the implementation of those solutions, which is my contention. The solutions exist, but they’re not well developed. Again, they either assume greed and malice will spontaneously disappear, or kick the can down the road under the banner of “cooperation”.
I am not ignorant of the solutions, I’ve read a great deal of theory. I just didn’t find them compelling. I have made a sincere attempt, I am not confused. I just have too much experience implementing human systems to be convinced by the solutions provided.
The difficulty isn’t in the cooperation part. It’s with the not having an authority. Some corrupt assholes will always try to take charge and be an authority.
I am an anarchist, but I am also not naive. The only way an anarchist utopia could ever truly exist is if people were completely free of greed and desire to have power over others. Which is extremely unlikely.
i’m not trying to simp for capitalism, but corruption can and does happen under any system
Anarchy. Can’t be corrupt if nobody has power. 😤
unironically this
mitual aid for the win
Roving bands of bandits would disagree.
Sir this is not a video game.
I was being pithy. I think it’s a bit absurd to say that corruption is impossible under anarchism because no one has power.
Power disparity is an unavoidable fact in every society, no matter the structure (or lack thereof). Some will be popular and some unpopular. Some will be physically strong and others physically weak. Some will seek to build up community and some will seek to tear it down.
And any amount of power disparity is prone to corruption. Surely I don’t need to point out examples of an absolute asshole getting popular and then using that popularity to take advantage of or hurt other people.
Anarchism, if it has one thing going for it, is that these problems tend to stay fairly local. But it also doesn’t give any solutions to these problems other than lynchmobs. So its a bit of a tradeoff. But it absolutely isn’t immune from corruption.
Well, technically it is immune to corruption. It isn’t immune to people being terrible and exploitative, but that’s technically not corruption. To be corrupt, you’d have to be given legitimate power, and then misuse it. The popular asshole created their power from scratch.
A system without legitimized power isn’t immune to bad people creating power, but it is technically immune to corruption since there’s nothing to corrupt.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a system without some form of legitimized power, as people will always fill that vacuum. There will be a village elder or judge or peacekeeper or something, as those all fulfill necessary elements to a functioning society, and they will all come with some amount of legitimate authority.
Now, I suppose it might be fair to say that those “legitimate authorities” aren’t prescribed by the system, and therefore any corruption that follows is not the fault of the system. That seems a bit squishy to me, as those “legitimate authorities” are a natural outflow of society, and if the system does not have built in controls on those positions it is tacitly approving of any corruption.
But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.
But I like roads and hospitals and fire stations and no purge.
Anarchism is not the lack of government. It’s the lack of hierarchy. There can (and practically must) still be government and cooperation. Anarchism is not chaos, like the media portrays it.
There’s a lot of resources online if you want to learn more.
I didn’t find anarchic rhetoric to be very compelling because it seems like endless layers of “Actually,”, not unlike libertarianism. We wind up reinventing the thing discarded.
I’m a systems guy. When I have conversations with politically idealistic individuals, I ask them questions about their proposed system. Every anarchist I talk to at length about infrastructure and industry either refuses to imagine that people wouldn’t spontaneously cooperate out of the goodness of their hearts, or winds up reinventing hierarchies. But different hierarchies, which aren’t the same things for some reason.
I’m also a systems guy. It isn’t that people will spontaneously cooperate and just build roads or whatever. It’s about creating systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices. Yes, there will be disagreement on some things, but the solution with the most agreement will be enacted.
Also yes, not everyone can be involved in everything, so you need groups in charge of certain tasks. However, again, this does not need to be hierarchical. It just needs to be cooperative. Those groups will handle those tasks, and they’re accountable to the people. They aren’t above them. They’re just filling a role for now, as everyone is also doing.
I thought the same thing as you about anarchism for a while too. I thought it seemed stupid and that it couldn’t work, and they’re just reinventing the same things with different names. I don’t believe that anymore though. It turns out the structures we have in place lead us to a very poor understanding of alternative systems of governance, for some very mystifying reason.
I’m not even specifically talking about systems of governance, just systems of decision and production.
How, tho? Once we get into the nitty gritty of implementation, how do you build that system? How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?
This is what I’m talking about. You either have to assume that in an anarchist utopia, greed and malice will somehow spontaneously disappear from all humanity, or you have to have to devise a way to handle that.
Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.
The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing
It turns out that getting parasocial apex predators to coexist peacefully is actually pretty difficult, and every system has to make compromises. I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.
Have you heard of Community Policing before? That’s an example of non-hierarchical cooperative policing, and it’s effective all over the world. I don’t know if you’re trying to be obtuse or just really haven’t heard or thought about any of this, but it isn’t anything particularly revolutionary.
I talked about this above. Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.
Absolutely, and they should be treated as human as anyone. They weren’t flawless gods. They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now. Hell, they threw out their first attempt in a few years (The Articles of Confederation). We should be inspired by their attempt and actions and try to fix the issues we can see in the current systems. That’s could mean starting over, like they did… twice.
It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”
Anarchism has been a philosophy for hundreds of years. There’s solutions to everything you’ve presented, and probably anything you could think of. Being ignorant of something isn’t the same thing as it not existing. It just means you don’t know about it yet. If you made a sincere attempt to understand Anarchist philosophy and though, and different forms of Anarchism, and they’re solutions, you wouldn’t be so confused. You don’t have to do this, but if you’re actually curious you should.
I have. In actual implementation, it’s still hierarchical, it just encourages outreach and communication between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
We already have accountability and cooperation through democratic elections. If you think that’s insufficient, that’s a valid critique, but not in itself a replacement. That’s the sticking point, developing a replacement that doesn’t fall to the same problems of the current system.
You said you’re a systems person. Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one? So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent. Building a stable system with effective checks and balances is much more difficult than anarchist literature suggests. And even if you do make a system that starts off stable, it’s only a matter of time before people figure out a way to exploit the system.
You can have a system that’s democratic, responsive, or just. But you can’t have all three, they are functionally at odds with one another. You can design a system that appears to be all three, but implementation will expose the design flaws sooner or later.
I doubt it. I believe they expected we’d change the system they built, and I agree that we should, but the foundation is pretty difficult to improve upon. Not saying it’s perfect, but pragmatically it’s fairly practical. If anything, it suffers mostly from the charges we’ve made to it; capping the House and Citizens United have been particularly damaging changes.
I respectfully disagree. Sure, solutions are considered, but not really the implementation of those solutions, which is my contention. The solutions exist, but they’re not well developed. Again, they either assume greed and malice will spontaneously disappear, or kick the can down the road under the banner of “cooperation”.
I am not ignorant of the solutions, I’ve read a great deal of theory. I just didn’t find them compelling. I have made a sincere attempt, I am not confused. I just have too much experience implementing human systems to be convinced by the solutions provided.
Cooperation can still exist without authority.
The difficulty isn’t in the cooperation part. It’s with the not having an authority. Some corrupt assholes will always try to take charge and be an authority.
I feel like the logical endpoint of “corruption in a system of anarchy” then is just bandit gangs.
I have a hard time saying those are worse for society than rich capitalists these days. But they’re not good.
I am an anarchist, but I am also not naive. The only way an anarchist utopia could ever truly exist is if people were completely free of greed and desire to have power over others. Which is extremely unlikely.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want it, tho. 😔