"Oh no they're feeding people we don't like on land they don't pay our protection racket for, and they self-organized to do it without using coercive hierarchies! Quick, get 'em!"
"Oh no they're feeding people we don't like on land they don't pay our protection racket for, and they self-organized to do it without using coercive hierarchies! Quick, get 'em!"
Anarchism is just normal human interaction, free of all the bullshit that markets and currency brought about. Everyone does anarchism any time they do something for another person without some kind of transaction or coercion.
Free of all the bullshit the state brought out, too.
And I don't really think anarchism is quite normal interaction. Hierarchies have formed over and over again; whatever our natural inclinations are have not guarded against it. Preventing the formation of hierarchies has to be a new societal norm to maintain an anarchist society.
Anarchism isn't against all hierarchies, only unjust hierarchies.
Oh no I've been out pedanted!
My post still works if you say unjust hierarchies everywhere I said hierarchies though.
Fear my abilities to "umm ackually"! Hahaha!
Also you're right, sorry 👉 👈
Umm, Akshually you're an owl and owls can't talk BACK TO YOUR BURROW!
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Hierarchies tend to be much more malleable outside of state contexts. Think about the seasonal cultures that are sometimes heirarchal and sometimes egalitarian. Think about the "chiefs" who are cast out if they don't provide enough yams to their subjects.
Agreed! Thing is, most non state societies had these. Anthropologists call them "leveling mechanisms."
There were a couple of societies up until like the 90s where if someone was trying to bully you or order you around you could just pick up your 50-60ish pounds of tools and posessions, give that person the finger, and walk a day or two to go live with your cousins or neighbors or whatever. The environment had enough food, and population density was low enough, that no one could easily monopolize and control resources. Afaik that mostly changed as neighboring farmers and pastoralists moved in to the region, but it's something that existed in some places within many of our lifetimes.
You can see some echoes of it in places like the GDR; The whole meme about women having better sex bc they could just leave shitty relationships due to the GDR's housing, jobs, and childcare policies. Shitty men couldn't control women when the women could just pack up and go somewhere else with relatively little difficulty.
The violence of the state clearly makes these sorts of hierarchies rigid. Indeed, that's what a state is.
Right. And I really end up wondering: can a state maintain the heirarchy of proletariat over vanquished bourgeoisie without the office of state becoming its own fixed heirarchy?
Afaik one of the critical drivers of most hierarchies is the ability to control access to important resources. It's really easy to control access to a mine, factory, or farm. But it's very hard to control access to wild or semi-wild fruit trees, or goats, or the sea. For that exact reason a lot of states undertook operations like exterminating the Bison/Tatanka, draining swamps that people relied on for forage and hunting, banning numerous kinds of hunting and foraging tools, or just clear cutting forests. If people can just wander around eating what they find and sleeping where they please you can't make them pay taxes, so one of the first things a state has to do is enclose the commons, slaughter the wild game, post soldiers at the wells, and otherwise create scarcity.
We've got a lot of potential existing and emerging technologies that could make it much harder to centralize control of some kinds of resources and products, so there's definitely some room for movement there. If you can use a lathe to build a lathe then build some motors and stick a cheap computer on and eventually you've bootstrapped your way to 3d-printers and 3-axis mills you're less dependent on big, expensive, easy to control factories. That's not enough by itself, but that removes some ways that capitalists and states can control a population.
Like I'm not saying it's everything by any means, but one potential road to a stateless society is creating a world where people can just pick up and leave if someone tries to bully them. Chasing nomads and semi-nomads around has historically been very resource intensive and undesirable and those are often some of the last populations to be forcibly integrated in to states. It's why one of my "If I ruled the world" dreams is converting the whole planet in to a vast permaculture gardne where you can find stuff to eat anywhere in any season.
Oh shoot yeah, that was my "crank socialist megaproject" from that recent thread.
The way you're talking, you would really like As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. She hits a lot of the same points as you, builds on Fanon and draws on her own experiences practicing indigenous life ways in so-called Canada.
Something I haven't really resolved in myself. I have a tendency, but revolutionary energy is so far from where I live atm and it's more important to bring people on side and help people with their struggles to build community.
I read a book called War in the Tribal Zone. It defined Tribes as a structured, hierarchical society that forms when an Imperial society intrudes in to the territory of low-complexity, non-hierarchical societies. Not "primitive" societies, but societies that never developed hierarchies because they never needed them. And the theory the book was putting forward is that when a low-complexity society tries to defend itself from an Imperialist state they tend to form Tribal societies as a kind of immune reaction - Either they develop more structured political and military organization to better fight against the invader's highly organized troops and logistics, or the invaders find compradors and give those collaborators the guns and material they need to take control of the society.
Regardless of exactly why and how it happens, the result is a more hierarchical society with more coercive political and military organs. There are other ways to try to exist, but mostly they don't work and the societies that try them are either wiped out or forced to submit something else.
The part I thought was interesting is that it positioned the nation-state of the Imperialist states as a technology in and of itself. A technology that allowed for large, highly effective militaries and the efficient production and movement of goods and materiel. A nation state might send in a hundred soldiers and a low-complexity society could wipe them out, but if that happened then the next year the nation state would send a thousand soldiers, and using their territories they'd violently recruit more and more soldiers and send them out to die until the society they were trying to control was either destroyed or enslaved.
And the premise was that basically once one society invents the nation-state, or it's various highly organized hierarchical predecessors, it forced everyone it came in contact with to adopt the technology. All the attempts to build a competing organizational technology were ultimately defeated, resulting in a world where almost all military and economic power is held by nation states. It's, idk, like introducing a chunk of crystal in to a supersaturated solution. The crystal catalyst forces everything else to crystalize in response, turning the entire solution from an un-structured material to a structured crystal.
And then my take-away is that if we every want to have something other than nation-states we have to build a nation-state killing organizational technology. That might mean chewing up nation-states from the inside using parallel power, it might mean building a new kind of non-state organization that can fight nation states on equal footing, and it might mean something else entirely. Regardless, I don't think we're there yet, but with all the possibilities of rapidly emerging technologies and the chaos of the 21st century I think the ground is better laid than it has been in most of the last few centuries.
erratic flows
sporadic mossification
digesting the crystal through rhizomatic overgrowth
communalized adaptive planning of economy and ecology
decentralized meshnets offering tools and processes for democratic decision-making, collective mobilization and strategic maneuvering
perpetuating itself everywhere at once, slowly, inevitably
revolutionary mycelium
metabolizing capitalism
scaffolding infrastructure to build a million utopias
For a bunch of people who don't have Archons folks sure are upset by AnArchism.