anarchy and democracy
(2017) by center for stateless society on mutual exchange symposium via kindle version from anarchist library.. 94 pgs [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/center-for-a-stateless-society-anarchy-and-democracy]
notes/quotes:
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Introducing the June 2017 C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium
Cory Massimino @corymassimino – June 1st, 2017
Mutual Exchange is the Center for a Stateless Society’s effort to achieve mutual understanding through dialogue. Following one of the most divisive Presidential elections in recent U.S. American history and a dangerous victor’s contested ascension to power, the political climate is one of intense ideological strife and disagreement. *There is no better time to refocus at least some of our efforts on respectful and mutually beneficial discourse. Periodically delving into the weeds of complex theoretical topics to collaboratively **experiment with ideas is not only necessary for individual and collective intellectual progress, but is part and parcel of anarchist praxis itself.
*to me.. only legit mutually beneficial would be 2 conversations .. as infra
**to experiment with itch-in-the-soul.. everyday.. legit new/different experiment.. a people experiment
mutual exchange symposium .. center for stateless society.. et al
“Fighting over the definitions of words can sometimes seem like a futile and irrelevant undertaking. However, it’s important to note that *whatever language gets standardized in our communities shapes what we can talk and think about,” says William Gillis in his lead essay of our June symposium. Indeed, rather than pointless “infighting” and social posturing, the Center for a Stateless Society hopes to create a platform for free expression that benefits authors and readers alike by **productively clarifying our values and principles.
*this isn’t why we should try to have seat at the table ness.. it’s just another symptom of us all being in sea world.. speaking whalespeak
**red flags and cancerous distractions.. oi
Whether or not any sort of resolution, consensus, or agreement results from our ensuing dialogue is, perhaps ironically, *not the point. Ten anarchist authors have chosen to participate in an in-depth examination of the idea of “democracy” and how it relates to anarchy. I hope they are able to develop, advance, and popularize their individual ideas, but also set a standard for productive, yet **diverse debate that is sorely needed right now.
*not just not the point.. a cancerous distraction
**nah.. debate ness is just contributing to and perpetuating the death of us
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
Combining the Greek words demos (“common people”) and kratos (“strength”), democracy means “rule of the commoners.” The philosophical and political debates surrounding democracy extend back 2500 years to Ancient Athens. For much of recent history, many people consider democracy to be a cherished value to protect and spread across the globe, while many others see it as a privilege they hope to someday enjoy. Even others, from all over the political spectrum, see democracy as an enemy to be squashed.
need to let go of any form of people telling other people what to do.. any form of democratic admin.. any form of m\a\p
This C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium will explore what anarchists have to say about democracy. What is the historical relationship between democracy and anarchy? Is democracy always entwined with the state? What should anarchists think of democratic government? What are truly democratic values and how do they relate to anarchist values? How does democracy relate to market exchange and social organization? How should those interested in social change view democracy? How do causes like feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism relate to democracy?
again.. any form of democratic admin.. any form of m\a\p.. killing us
It is no secret that a President Trump is reigniting debates surrounding democracy and democratic values among many commentators. What will a Trump presidency mean for democracy around the world and how should anarchists react? Moving forward in the 21st century it is *imperative that we get to the roots of these nuanced debates so that we are better prepared to build the new world in the shell of the old, while also staying afloat in the stormy seas of authoritarianism, political violence, turbulent geopolitical alliances, and genocide.
*oi.. cancerous distraction
The June C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium features the Center’s own William Gillis, Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, and Grayson English in addition to Shawn Wilbur, Wayne Price, Alexander Reid Ross, Gabriel Amadej, Derek Wittorff, and Jessica Flanagan. Every day this month the Center will publish another entry in our ongoing conversation from one of the ten authors fleshing out their thoughts regarding the above questions and issues. Some essays will remain stand-alone contributions while others will provide back-and-forth commentary between multiple authors.
william gillis.. kevin carson..
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I look forward to seeing these prolific and nuanced writers hash out all their points of disagreement as well as agreement and hope you stay with the Center throughout the entire month to gain both theoretical and practical insights from our symposium.
Before the exchange kicks off tomorrow, June 2nd, here are some preliminary texts and resources related to the longstanding anarchist debate on democracy that I hope are useful going forward:
- The Anarchist Critique of Democracy – CrimethInc.
- Are Anarchism and Democracy Opposed? A Response to CrimethInc. – Wayne Price
- Against Democracy – Coordination of Anarchist Groups
- Neither Democrats nor Dictators: Anarchists – Errico Malatesta
- An Anarchist Critique of Democracy – Moxie Marlinspike and Windy Hart
- Democracy is Direct – Cindy Milstein
- Occupy and Anarchism’s Gift of Democracy – David Graeber
- Direct Action, Anarchism, Direct Democracy – David Graeber
- Down With the Law! – Libertad
- Anarchy and Democracy – Robert Graham
anarchists against democracy.. malatesta conditions law.. moxie on democracy.. direct action an ethnography.. david on direct action.. david on anarchism ness.. mes on anarchy and democracy.. mes on decentralization and econ coord..
The Abolition Of Rulership Or The Rule Of All Over All
William Gillis @rechelon – June 2nd, 2017
william gillis.. gillis on debt.. gillis on small scale.. et al
Fighting over the definitions of words can sometimes seem like a futile and irrelevant undertaking. However it’s important to note that *whatever language gets standardized in our communities shapes what we can talk and think about..t So much of radical politics often boils down to acrimonious dictionary-pounding over words like “capitalism,” “markets,” “socialism,” “communism,” “nihilism,” etc. Each side is usually engaged in bravado rather than substance. Radical debates turn into preemptive declarations of “everyone knows X” or “surely Y,” backed by nothing more than the social pressure we can bring to bear against one another. And yet — to some degree — we’re trapped in this game because acquiescing to the supposed authority of our adversaries’ definitions would put us at an unspeakable disadvantage. The stakes of debates over “mere semantics” can be quite high, determining what’s easy to describe and what’s awkward or laborious.
*again.. to me.. cancerous distraction.. need to try something legit diff ie: idiosyncratic jargon ness et al
Thus the partisan impulse is usually to define our adversaries out of existence: muddying their analytic waters, emphasizing any and all negative associations, and painting their conclusions as insane, verboten, or outgroup. At the same time we leap on any and all positive associations we can twist to serve our own ends. Debate over definitions is so often merely a game of social positioning: every word reverberating with the different associations of different audiences and thus what alliances you’re declaring or managing to ascribe to your interlocutor. *Language is a messy, complicated, and nebulous place where fallacious arguments are not only par for the course but often thought to be how the whole thing hangs together. In the worst corners of academia and “radical” politics this is embraced wholesale, where philosophy is reduced to mere poetry and cheap ploys of emotive resonance: batted back and forth with an underlying smug derision at the entire affair. “Have you ever noticed that we use the same word for your job — your occupation — as we do for the occupation of Iraq?” and this is somehow treated as insightful rather than doing violence to clarity and honesty.
*rather.. language as control/enclosure et al
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Obviously my biases here — and social affiliations — are quite apparent. While there can be a place for rhetoric to convey emphasis and it is sometimes necessary to counter fire with fire, in general I find these opportunistic language games detestable. Whenever possible I prefer a subversive linguistic pluralism, happy to adopt the language of those I’m speaking to, declaring myself, for example, pro-“capitalism” or pro-“communism” in some contexts and against “capitalism” or against “communism” in others. If by “capitalism” some poor soul means nothing more than economic freedom then I’m fine adopting his tribe’s language to reach him — the same holds true with “communism”. Yet opportunities for such ecumenism are few and far between; even in those situations where we can escape tribal jockeying and arguments from popularity, such words almost always carry hidden baggage through their broader associations, with the explicit definition hiding the implicit conclusions of its wider use. When it comes to semantics, I’m of the opinion that our first step should always be to discard popular associations as much as possible and decipher what are the most illuminating or fundamental dynamics at play, only then attempting to realign or reserve our most basic words for the most rooted concepts. If our final mapping of concepts to terms is idiosyncratic or provocative, or if it strips away the full array of associations found in common use, then perhaps all the better..t
*yeah that.. idiosyncratic jargon via self-talk as data and ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling
While such an approach is often contentious, I believe that it offers a relatively nonpartisan compromise and starting point in definition debates. Let us hold off as much as possible on barraging each other with claims about what’s more “authoritative,” much less what can be leveraged as proof of such, and likewise abandon the negative and positive association-judo. We can always return to this after we’ve sorted out what sort of realities are even before us to map our vocabulary to. This offers us a certain efficiency, handling some quite heavy work at the start, but at least offering us something other than an endless quagmire going forward. More important though is the danger that jumbled interpretive networks or misaligned concepts pose when normalized. Terms that fail to cut reality at the joints can mislead and obscure, make some basic realities incredibly hard to state or address. In language we should seek depth, generality, and accuracy first and foremost, not mere rhetorical expedience. There is a place for the play of “interestingly” open interpretations but such hunger should not consume us and sever our capacity to act.
Democracy and Anarchy
In many contemporary western societies “democracy” retains positive (if nebulous) associations. Naturally, many activists have therefore repeatedly tried to latch onto that term and redirect it in narratives or analysis that line up with their own political aspirations. “You like chocolate, right? Well anarchism is basically extra chocolately chocolate. It’s more chocolate than chocolate. It’s like direct chocolate.”
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This opportunistic wordplay is at least self-aware, and such maneuverings seems fair game to many. After all, isn’t “anarchy” a similarly nebulous word — a site of contention and redefinition?
Yet I’d argue that the situations are quite different. *The fight over “anarchy” is an inescapable one for anarchists because the world we want will never be obtainable as long as the term’s historical definition goes unchallenged..t In every language that touched ancient Greek, “anarchy” bundles together the explicit definition of “without rulership” with the implicit definition of “fractured rulership” (what should really be called ‘spasarchy’) in a nasty Orwellianism that makes the concept of a world without domination unspeakable and often unthinkable. We have a term for the abolition of power relations and we use it instead to refer to chaotic, violent, dog-eat-dog situations of strong (albeit decentralized) power relations. In short, the fight over the definition of “anarchy” is a battle to untangle an existing knot.
*to me.. if it’s a fight and if it has to be challenged.. then not legit freedom.. any form of m\a\p
On the other hand, “democracy” tends to stand for majority rule and etymologically for the rule of all over all. If there is an Orwellianism at play it is seems to me one of being too charitable to the term, sneaking in associations of freedom when one is in fact describing a particular flavor of tyranny..t A situation more akin to “war is peace” than the “freedom is slavery” is at play with “anarchy.”
yeah that.. any form of m\a\p.. just diff flavors of same song
Honest proponents of democracy can of course contend that such an “ideal” would look nothing like our contemporary world and so the characterization of our nation states as “democracies” misrepresents what true democracy would actually be. But it would still be a dystopia to anarchists. “Rulership by the populace” is clearly a concept irreconcilable with “without rulership” unless one has atrophied to the point of accepting the nihilism of liberalism and its mewling belief in the inescapability of rulership. Or perhaps even going so far as to join with fascists and other authoritarians who silence their conscience with the ideological assertion that one cannot even limit power relations, only rearrange them..t
huge.. need a way sans any form of m\a\p
Etymology isn’t destiny but it does carry a strong momentum and corrective force. I’m not sure why we should feel obliged to fight an uphill battle to redefine “democracy” in a direction consistent with anarchist aspirations. And in any case, from an abstract distance it seems wasteful to assign two terms to the same concept.
rather.. why we need to define anything.. naming the colour ness et al. marsh label law et al..
Those claiming that democracy and anarchy can be reconciled seem to either be rhetorical opportunists — gravely mistaken about what they can and should leverage — or else they seem gravely out of alignment with anarchism’s aspirations, treating “without rulership” not as a guiding star but a noncommittal handwave.
huge.. any form of m\a\p
Perhaps this is today the regrettable consequence of a few decades of anarchist recruitment from activist ranks, a conveyor belt that has sadly often resulted in the most shallow of conversions. Rather than a fervent ethical opposition to rulership, we’ve often settled for merely instilling a mild distaste for collaboration with the existing state on leftists, sometimes going no deeper than “you want to accomplish X with your activism but have you noticed that the state is in your way?” This has led to generations of activists — many I count as close friends — who have never considered how they might achieve their standard collection of leftist desires like universal health care in the absence of a state. When pressed they invariably describe a state apparatus, squirming in recognition and cognitive dissonance. “Oh, sure I’m describing a centralized body wielding coercive force and issuing edicts, but it wouldn’t be, you know, The State… because, like, well it wouldn’t systematically kill black people at the hands of the police.” Such an anemic analysis of the state’s crimes never ceases to be shocking. Just as the gutless defanging of anarchism’s radical ethical hunger and dismemberment of its philosophical roots to a mere political platform is invariably depressing.
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Let us be clear; if anarchy means anything of substance then many of these people are not really anarchists. At least not yet! They do not believe anarchy is achievable or even thinkable. And this is *reflected in their own frequent aversion and/or equivocation in relation to the term “anarchy,” gravitating more to some positive associations they have seen made with it than the underlying concept of a world truly without rulership. Compared to our present society they want the things often associated with anarchism without the core that draws them. I was — for a time — hopeful that such individuals would move to the much more open term “horizontalist.” In truth they’d be better described as minarchist social democrats, who want a cuddlier, friendlier, flatter, more local and responsive state that makes people feel like happy participants and doesn’t engage in world historic atrocities.
*to me.. legit freedom (aka: w/o rulership et al) has to be sans any form of m\a\p.. so you as well
Yet for those of us who have tasted the prospect of a world without rulership, this is simply a difference in degree of dystopia. If it truly were possible to achieve some kind of enlightened social democracy without wealth inequality, systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, and with some decentralization of state function, anarchists would still go to the barricades because this is not enough.
If anarchism is to mean anything of substance, it is surely not merely an opening bid from which you are happy to settle. Anarchy doesn’t stand for small amounts of domination: it stands for no domination. Although our approach to that ideal will surely be asymptotic, *the whole point of anarchism is to actually pursue it rather than give up and settle for some arbitrary “good enough” half-measure. Such tepid aspirations is what has historically defined liberals and social democrats in contrast to us.
*if only.. problem is that if we leave out even one of us.. then it’s already half measure ness
But it’s important to go further, because “democracy” doesn’t solely pose a danger of half-measures but also of a unique dimension of authoritarianism. A pure expression of “the rule of all over all” could be a hell of a lot worse than “Sweden with Neighborhood Assemblies.” The etymology itself seems to best reflect a nightmare scenario in which everyone constrains and dominates everyone else. If we seek to match words to the most distinct and coherent concepts then perhaps the truest expression of “demo-cracy” would be a world where everyone is chained down by everyone else, tightening our grip on our neighbors just as they in turn choke the freedom from our lungs.
this is actually how everything has been to date..
To be sure few proponents of “democracy” specifically define it as “the rule of all over all.” There are many distinct dynamics that folks single out and focus on, but none of these definitions directly address the problem of rulership itself.
again.. to me.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
Democracy as Majority Rule
The most conventional definition of democracy among the wider populace is today quite rare in anarchist circles. At this point “majority rules” is rarely advocated by anyone in my experience outside some old fogies in the underdeveloped backwaters of the anarchist world like the British Isles, and its use in ostensibly anarchist meetings or organizations now rises to moderately scandalous. But it’s maybe worth reiterating that majority rule can be deeply oppressive to minorities. If 51% of your neighborhood committee votes to eat the other 49% alive, that’s a hell of a lot worse than a situation without majority rules where one person refuses to mow their lawn and thus unilaterally inflicts their malaesthetic on the rest of the neighborhood.
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Proponents of such tyranny by the majority love to pretend that the only alternative is “tyranny by the minority.” But anarchist theory is all about removing the structures and means by which rulership can be asserted or expressed by anyone, majority or minority.
again.. if only.. because if non rulership.. then no judgment.. then all are included.. so fighting/resisting et al.. are irrelevant s at best.. but mostly cancerous distractions
This is probably not the place to list them all like some kind of 101 course, but one example is superempowering technologies like guns that asymmetrically make resistance more efficient than domination. Such technologies are directly responsible for the increase of liberty over recent history. In an era where capital intensive undertakings like trained knights on horseback trumped anything else, you got rulership by elites; when the best weapons are one-kill-averaging soldiers, you just line up your troops and the one with the biggest count can be expected to win. But high-ammunition guns give every individual a veto against the lynch mob outside their door, allowing guerrillas to impede empires that vastly outscale them in capital. Technologies like the printing press and internet function similarly. And on the other side of the coin, the infrastructural extent and dependent nature of modern technologies of control or domination makes them brittle against resistance, easily prey to acts of disruption and sabotage. These tools — along with technologies of resilience and self-sufficiency — allow individuals to reject the capricious edicts of anyone, be they a minority or a majority.
Ideally anarchists seek to highlight and strengthen such dynamics with the political approaches we take, *treating everyone like they have the most powerful of vetoes, capable of destroying everything, of grinding everything to a halt if they are truly intolerably imposed upon. This focus on individuals stops “the community” or other beasts from running rampant, forcing a detente tolerable for all parties. Such truces are far more likely to be attentive to the severity of individual desires, because “one vote per person” is incapable of reflecting just how much a person has at stake: something we could never hope to make objective and would be laughable to try to have a collective body legislate.
*cancerous distraction of us & them ness..
and violence as resistance to get there.. oi
What norms fall out of such an assumption of veto powers are complex (and I’ve argued left market property norms are likely to be one) but at the center is always freedom of association. The consensus society is one primarily comprised of autonomous realms so that individuals can minimize conflict between their swinging fists and maximize the positive freedoms provided by collaboration. But note also the psychological norms. Majority rule treats people as means to whatever ends you want (rallying a large enough army at the polls), *whereas a consensus detente can never lose sight of the fact that people are agents with their own particular desires. There is no subsumption of one’s subjective desires into merely being “one of the vote-losers”, a bloc rendered homogeneous and dehumanized by such democracy.
*ugh.. not true.. if any form/degree of consensus
Okay agree some, but maybe we can say that consensus itself is democracy?
Democracy as Consensus
This is probably the most charitable way of framing “democracy” but here too are deep problems.
*There’s a massive difference between consensus that’s arrived at through free association, and consensus that’s arrived because people are locked into some collective body to some degree. Often what passes for “consensus” within anarchist activist projects is merely consensus within the prison of a reified organization. Modern anarchists are still quite bad at embracing the fluidity of truly free association, and we cling to familiar edifices. Our organizations reassure us insofar as they function like the state, simplistic monoliths that exist outside of time and beyond the changing desires and relations of their constituent members.
*not really.. same song since either way binds us..
public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
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*Truly anarchist approaches to consensus would prioritize making the collectivity organic and ad hoc, an arrangement that prioritizes individual choice in every respect..t Not just the prospect or potential of choice but the active use of it.
*choice ness is cancerous distraction as well.. finite set of choices as the death of us ness.. oi
need: curiosity over decision making
This would mean adopting an unterrified attitude about dissolution and reformation, learning new habits and growing new muscles that have atrophied in the totalitarian reference frame of our statist world. As it now stands, the prospect of going separate ways on a thing if we can’t reach consensus on a single collectively unified path strikes absolute fear into the hearts of most.
*For consensus to be truly anarchistic we must be willing to consense upon autonomy, to shed off our reactionary hunger for established perpetual collective entities. Otherwise consensus will erode back in the direction of majority rules, individuals feeling obliged to tolerate decisions lest they break the uniformity of the established collective. Almost everyone of this generation is quite familiar with the general assemblies of Occupy that endlessly and fruitlessly fought over essentially just what actions would be formally endorsed under a local Occupy’s brand. Clearly in many cases we should have just gone our separate ways, working out not a single blueprint but a tolerable treaty to allow us to undertake separate projects or actions. The brand provided by The General Assembly was a centralization too far, creating such a high value real estate that everyone was obliged to fight to seize it. Surely anarchists should resist the formation of such black holes.
*whatever w the term anarchist.. but if want legit non rule.. if want legit freedom.. won’t happen till we let go of consensus ness.. again.. public consensus always oppresses someone(s).. maté trump law et al.. doesn’t matter if maj/min.. if it’s just one..
Okay, but regardless of the size and permanence of the collectives involved, maybe democracy is just collective decision-making itself?
Democracy as Collective Decision-making
While there are unfortunately many pragmatic contexts on Earth that oblige a degree of collective decision-making, it’s dangerous to fetishize collective decision-making itself.
it’s dangerous in itself.. decision making is unmooring us law et al
Many young leftist activists get caught with a bug that suggests the core problems with our world are those of “individualism” by which they mean a kind of psychopathic self-interest that is inattentive to others. The solution, this bug tells them, is to do everything collectively. To stomp out anti-social perspectives by obliging social participation. If we all go to meetings together then we’ll become more or less friends.
The unspoken transmutation they appeal to is one where extraversion and being enmeshed in social interactions will somehow suppress selfish desires. Of course in reality the opposite is often true. The most altruistic people in the world are often introverted individuals who prefer to act alone and the most psychopathic predators are often those most at home manipulating a web of social relations.
Many leftists are scarred by the alienating social dynamics of our society and seek meetings as a kind of structured socializing time to make friends and conjure a sense of belonging to a community, but this is absolutely not the same thing as engendering a sense of altruism or empathy. If anything collective meetings are horrible draining experiences that scar everyone involved and only partially satiate the most isolated and socially desperate. Like a starving person eating grass, the nutrition is never good enough and so the activist becomes trapped in endless performative communities, going to endless group meetings to imperfectly reassure base psychological needs rather than efficaciously change the world for the better. (I say such cutting words with all the love and sympathy of someone who’s nevertheless persisted as an activist and organizer attempting to do shit for almost two decades.) *Collective decision-making itself is no balm or salve to the horrors that plague this world.
*nowhere near a balm.. decision making is unmooring us.. killing us.
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But that’s not even the worst of it. Collective decision-making is itself fundamentally constraining. It frequently makes situations worse in its attempt to make decisions as a collective rather than autonomously as networked individuals..t
individual/collective.. irrelevant.. the cancer is in the finite set of choices
*The processing of information is the most important dynamic to how our societies are structured..t A boss in a large firm for example appoints middle managers to filter and process information because a raw stream of reports from the shop floor would be too overwhelming for his brain to analyze. There are many ways in which aspects of the flow of information constrain social organizations, but when it comes to collective decision-making the most relevant thing is the vast difference between the complexity our brains are capable of holding and the small trickle of that complexity we are capable of expressing in language. **As a rule, individuals are better off with the autonomy to just act in pursuit of their desires rather than trying to convey them in their full unknowable complexity..t ***But when communication is called for it’s far far more efficient to speak in pairs one-on-one, and let conclusions percolate organically into generality. “Collective” decision-making almost always assumes a discussion with more than two people — a collective — in an often incredibly inefficient arrangement where everyone has to put their internal life in stasis and listen to piles of other people speak one at a time. The information theoretic constraints are profound.
*oi.. rather.. how sea world is structured.. we need diff info.. ie: self-talk as data via ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling as global detox/reset.. so we can org around legit needs
**let’s go with that rule.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
***just true for whalespeak.. we have no idea what forms of communication legit free people would use.. mostly because everything changes when we change (let go of controlling) who gathers in a space
If collective decision-making is supposed to provide us with the positive freedoms possible through collaboration, it offers only the tiniest fraction of what is usually actually possible. That there are occasionally situations so shitty that collective decision making is requisite does not mean anarchists should worship or applaud it. And one would be hard pressed to classify something far more general like collaboration itself as “democracy”.
Okay, but maybe we can reframe democracy as an ethics?
Democracy As “Getting a Say in the Things That Affect You”
It got particularly popular in the 90s to frame anarchy as a world where everyone gets a say in the things that affect them. And for a time this seemed to nicely establish anarchism as a kind of unterrified feminism. But let’s be real: there are plenty of things that massively affect you that you should have no vote over. Whether or not your crush goes out with you should entirely be at their own discretion. Freedom of association is quite often sharply at odds with “getting a say over things that affect you.”
oi.. so reactionary.. so .. cancerous distraction ary
oi to rest of paragraph.. oi.. whalespeak
This may seem in conflict with the moral we drew from our discussion of consensus and the necessity to create a detente grounded in a respect for individual vetoes, but it’s important to remember that we weren’t settling for the naive first-order resolution where anyone strongly affected by something sets off a nuke. There’s a kind of meta-structure that emerges in any network of people upon consideration. The detentes we ultimately gravitate to involve certain more abstract norms, that are more generally useful to all than their violation in specific instances. Respect for freedom of association is one such very strongly emergent norm.
And in any case the goal of anarchists is freedom, we champion a decentralized world — among other conditions — precisely so that it might dramatically increase our freedom, not chain us down. This means at the very least cultivating a culture of live and let live when someone blocks you on Twitter rather than setting the world ablaze because you feel entitled to their attention.
oi.. any form of m\a\p chains us.. includes responding/resisting/refuse-ing ness
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Similarly if everyone in your generation starts using Snapchat — which you dislike — that puts you at a disadvantage: such an emergent norm clearly affects you in a negative way. But this doesn’t and shouldn’t give you cause to bring your peers before the city council and demand that Snapchat be outlawed. The norms of freedom of association, freedom of information, and bodily autonomy cleave out distinct realms of action that can affect third parties immensely yet should not — barring absolutely extreme situations — be dictated or constrained by them. Every invention and discovery changes the world but you don’t get to vote against the propagation of truth, however disruptive it might be to your life.
oh my.. still talking voting ness..
Okay, but maybe we can reframe democracy as not as any kind of system but as a demographic?
left off top 12 or.. maybe thru mid 15 (next author)
Democracy as “The Rabble”
In recent times David Graeber has re-popularized the historical association of “democracy” with large underclasses. And it’s true that in certain points in history “democracy” served alongside “anarchy” as a boogeyman of the horrors they were claimed would arise if the ruling elites lost their stranglehold on the populace.
Certainly we anarchists leap to defend the unwashed masses from those sneering elites. *The prospect that the rabble would demolish the elites’ positions of power or get up to dirty and uncouth things with their freedom is something we embrace. But just because we despise those who despise “the rabble” doesn’t mean we should embrace any and all mobs or the concept of “the mob” itself. The positives that can be wrestled from this use of the term surely aren’t worth explicitly opening the door to “mobocracy”.
*ie of a chain.. of a cancerous distraction.. sucking the energy out of us.. let go
This archaic use of “democracy” has obvious subversive potential in our present world, flipping the positive affect built around “democracy” by our current rulers and returning it to those in conflict with them. But anarchists are not blind proponents of “the masses” in any and all situations, something this rhetorical opportunism would lock us into. *The masses can be horrifically wrong, and what is popularly desired can be quite unethical. It’s not vanguardism to resist pogroms or work to thwart the genocidal ambitions of majorities like in Rwanda. There are endless examples of “the masses” seeking to dominate, and our goal as anarchists is not to pick sides but to make such rulership impossible or at the very least costly.
*yeah.. horrifically.. i’d say.. no legit data to date..
Anarchists aren’t engaged in team sports; while we often defend underdogs in specific contexts, we’re not out to back one demographic against another in any kind of fundamental way.
but you just did.. ie: elite ness.. et al..
Okay, but does “democracy” still have a role as a transitory state?
Democracy as a Transitory State
This is a complicated issue because obviously it depends on a host of abstract and practical particulars. We’ve covered a lot of different definitions one encounters among apologists for “democracy” in anarchist circles, and what I’ve tried to highlight among all of them is both a *lack of any explicit anti-authoritarianism as well as a **series of lurking problems that risk warping things in an authoritarian direction.
*need to be sans any form of m\a\p
**red flags ness
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In some situations, certain things going by the name “democracy” would likely pose half-steps in the direction of anarchism. The replacement of a feudal lord with a village assembly would almost certainly be an improvement. We can get distracted with concerns about possible failure modes and lose sight of what’s actually happening on the ground. Just because the democratic processes of Rojava could theoretically bend in a more sharply nationalistic or racially oppressive direction doesn’t mean that they actually are. There are many situations where participatory democracy represents a major step forward, even something anarchists should fight for with our lives.
any form democratic admin a cancerous distraction.. otherwise.. wouldn’t be still playing wack a mole
But when democracy is idealized — when it’s generalized or elevated as an ideology rather than as a pragmatic strategy in a specific context — things gets dangerous. The risk of such idealization is inherent to its use. And **oftentimes democracy serves as a half-measure that actually impedes further progress. ***The Chomskyian strategy of compromise and “incremental steps” that secure bread today can actually further entrench power structures while providing minor ameliorations.
*rather.. always dangerous..
**rather.. all the time
***yeah.. that.. any form of m\a\p as part\ial ness.. for (blank)’s sake
Democracy is in almost every definition a kind of centralization and such centralization pulls everything under its control. Just as with other types of states, once you establish a centralized system with far-reaching capacity it starts to become more efficient for individual agents to try to do everything through the state: to capture it for your ends rather than working to build solutions from the roots up outside of it. Even those with sharp anarchist ideals start feeling the pressure to go to the General Assembly rather than doing things outside of it as actual agents.
*Like shooting people, in our messy and deeply dystopian world democracy may sometimes be necessary and strategic, but as anarchists our every inclination and instinct should be to avoid such means by default, to only cede to them kicking and screaming, and never cease feeling distaste. We must not lose sight of our ideals and even as we can only **asymptotically approach them we must still attempt to asymptotically approach them rather than asymptotically approaching some halfway point.
*let go.. unjustifiable strategy et al
**infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
And of course let us not forget that a world where say a social democrat like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn gets their way might even actually end up worse than our present horrorshow. Liberal and socialist policies have a long history of making worse the things they were supposedly out to fix.
Okay, but isn’t that unfair since the whole point is direct democracy?
A Note About “Directness”
It’s annoying how often young activists attempt to create a spectrum of democracy with varying levels of mediation or representation that places anarchy as synonymous with the most direct democracy. It’s true that depending upon a representative to speak on your behalf is an insanely inefficient approach — anyone who’s dealt even just with spokescouncils pooling few dozen people knows this. *We know that due to the shallow bandwidth of human language, conversation itself is ridiculously inefficient at a means of conveying the fullness of our internal desires and perspectives, so delegating to someone else with only the vaguest of outlines of what you want is surely much worse.
*language as control/enclosure
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature ie: tech as it could be
But what I find particularly pernicious about the reduction of anarchism to a mere “direct” qualifier on “democracy” is that it plays into a fetishization of immediacy that has already ideologically metastasized among anarchists, indeed often among those more insurrectionary or individualist figures on the other side of the debate over “democracy”. The issue with representation in my mind isn’t the lack of immediacy but a matter of limits to the flow of information. It’s a subtle but crucial difference.
representation as red flags.. not to mention no info to date legit (meaning none of it about legit free people)
14
A number of anarchists or former anarchists have in recent years increasingly grown to treat immediacy as the secret sauce — the very definition of freedom. This stems from a philosophical confusion over what freedom is and a very continental or psychological focus upon emotional affect, focusing on a phenomenological experience they associate with “freedom” — *that is to say a kind of spontaneity or impulsive reaction rather than reflection (since in our present world reflection often brings to attention just how constrained we actually are). To consider an action is precisely to chain it through a series of mediations, to filter and parse it. It’s important to note that the reactionary approach smothers one’s internal complexity, ultimately reducing an agent to a mere billiard ball. When treated as an ideal, immediacy necessarily involves the suppression of consciousness and thus of choice.
*to me.. spontaneous ness has nothing to do with reaction
graeber unpredictability/surprise law law et al
The problem with collective decisionmaking isn’t that the discrete deliberative bodies involved process information or ponder choices, but that such arrangements are ridiculously inefficient at it compared to individual autonomy: an embrace of the full agency of their constituents. *A more organic network of reflective individuals would provide more choice — that is to say more freedom.
*oi.. to me.. choice isn’t freedom.. need to try curiosity over decision making
Against All Rulership, Always
To people in the trenches just trying to grab whatever weapons they find useful, all this philosophical criticism of “democracy” no doubt appears to be an ungainly impediment. But anarchism is not a pragmatic project myopically concerned only with what can be won here and now. Our most famous triumphs have been our foresight — often our predictions of dangers to come from various stripes of “pragmatism” and “immediacy.” *Anarchism is a philosophy of infinite horizons, taking the longest and widest possible scope. An ethical philosophy of stunning and timeless audacity, not some historical artifact trapped in a limited set of concerns. This sweeping consideration is what enabled us to correctly predict the failures of Marxism, and it’s a tradition worth maintaining. Bakunin’s denouncement of Marx took place in a context long before Kronstadt and all the atrocities that would eventually become popularly synonymous with Marxism. Such “abstract philosophy” and non-immediacy split the ranks of those fighting against the capitalist order, weakening what they could bring to bear in the service of workers’ lives that very minute. **And yet the world is clearly all the better for it. Thanks to the anarchist schism with Marxism, the struggle for freedom was able to survive.
*not yet infinite enough.. need infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
**oh my
I’m not saying that a system of direct democratic town councils are going to be set up somewhere in the world tomorrow under the banner of “direct democracy” and turn genocidal or into some kind of totalitarian small town nightmare, but every take on “democracy” is nevertheless pretty distant from anarchy and thus unlikely to stay true. *When your ideal isn’t pointed at freedom itself it’s only a matter of time before the runaway compounding processes of domination warp its path.
*true.. so need a means sans any form of m\a\p
I am, at the end of the day, happy to grimace slightly and move along when some comrade I’m working with spouts something about “more democratic than democracy!” just as I’m capable of biting my tongue with the sincere but confused trapped in Marxist or anarcho-capitalist languages. Semantic battles are not the be-all and end-all, but attempts to appropriate the general goodwill towards “democracy” have yet to latch onto any underlying concepts worth validating. It seems to me that a far better practice is to stick somewhere close to the etymology of the word (the rule of all over all) and its near universal associations (majority rule).
15
One might object on the semantic grounds that it’s better to assign our words to their most positive possible interpretations, but I do think it’s important to have words for bad things, to be able to describe the array of possibilities we oppose with any sort of detail. It’s important to be able to see and comprehend the various flavors oppressive systems can take. Even if we don’t presently live in a full-blown democracy with all the horrors of a true domination of all over all, it’s still an illuminating extreme and one that I think warrants highlighting.
*Anarchism’s uniqueness is that it doesn’t seek to equalize rulership but to demolish it, a radical aspiration that cuts through the assumptions of our dystopian world. Anarchism isn’t about achieving a balance of domination — assuring that each person gets 5.2 milliHitlers of oppression each — but about abolishing it altogether..t
*if only.. for that need ie: gershenfeld something else law.. sans any form of m\a\p.. because none of us are free if one of us is chained..
Democracy, Anarchism, & Freedom
Wayne Price – June 3rd, 2017
I will use the definition of “democracy” as “rule of the commoners”—a definition going back to classical Greece. The “commoners” were both the majority of the population and the lower classes (of free, native-born, males, in ancient Greece). By “anarchism” I mean total opposition to the state, to capitalism (but not necessarily to the market), and to all other forms of oppression. This is pretty broad, but it rules out “anarcho-capitalists,” not to mention “national anarchists” (fascists).
oi.. need to let go of any form of m\a\p
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However, there are other anarchists who regard themselves as supporters of democracy. They claim that anarchism is the most extreme, radical, form of democracy. This is my view (I have written two essays on this topic; see Price 2009; 2016). I see both “democracy” and “anarchism” as requiring decision-making by the people, from the bottom-up, through cooperation, clashes of opinion, social experimentation, and group intelligence.
oi.. any form of decision making is unmooring us
If everyone is involved in governing (participatory democracy), then there is no government—no special institution over society which rules people. Anarchists are not against all social coordination, community decision-making, and protection of the people. They are generally for some sort of association of workplace committees and neighborhood assemblies. They are for the replacement of the police and military by an armed people (a democratic militia, so long as that is necessary). This is the self-organization of the people—of the former working class and oppressed population, until the heritage of class divisions and oppression has been dissolved into a united population.
oh my.. oh my.. oh my
Anarchism is Democracy without the State
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The minority may be said to have been coerced on this road-building issue, but I do not see this situation as one of domination. It is not like a white majority consistently dominating its African-American minority. In a stateless system of direct democracy, all participate in decision-making, even if all individuals are not always satisfied with the outcome. In any case, the aim of anarchism is not to end absolutely all coercion, but to reduce coercion to the barest minimum possible. Institutions of domination must be abolished and replaced by bottom-up democratic-libertarian organization. But there will never be a perfect society. This is why I began by defining “anarchism” as a society without the state, capitalism, or other institutions of domination.
min coercion.. aka: voluntary compliance.. oi
Does Democracy Require Domination?
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Democracy: Self-Government or Systemic Powerlessness?
21
Well, I propose consensus. There are probably cries of opposition from all directions: “consensus doesn’t work in large groups,” “it takes too much time and energy to develop consensus on every decision,” “consensus suffers from the same informal power dynamics of a core group that you mention about democracy,” and more. In reality there are many forms of consensus — many of which are problematic — but I think that some forms are very broadly applicable to most economic functions of a society where politics is not the institutionalization of oppression, or the exercising of power and manipulation, but rather the mutual process of liberation and freedom. .. Not all consensus models practically become hierarchical, which cannot be said about democracy. That being said, small affinity groups can easily be inclusive and reach consensus without the necessity of formal structures preventing conflicts from breaking down communication, goals, or agreements on proposals.
oi
public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
23
The Linguistics of Democracy
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The most important thing to point out in Aristotle, rather, is his sexism and classism. Enfranchising class divisions within the city, Aristotle automatically pitched experiential equality into the crisis of economic inequality. The basis for this failure of economic and political thought lies in Aristotle’s assessment of women as lacking the logos of politics. Women’s authority belonged in the oikos, the household, from which we receive the root for our words economy and ecology. Women cared for the running of the household, its economy and relation to the outside, while disturbingly men sought socio-political status often through pedophilia. If, as Marx claimed, man is not a political but first a social animal, it is crucial to recognize even in Marx the placement of oikos and economy at the root of social intercourse.
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
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Anarchy and Democracy: Examining the Divide
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Anarchy and Democracy: Examining the Divide – shawn p wilbur
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But those practical difficulties should also be apparent, and it is when confronted with those practical complications that anarchists most often turn back towards democracy (and sometimes hierarchy, authority, the absolute, etc.) as elements that must somehow be carried over into anarchistic societies.
oi
Practical Constraints
If anti-state capitalists are constantly called to wrestle with the question of “who will build the roads,” anarchists are faced with constant questions about decision-making practices: Who will break the ties? How will you resolve the conflicts? Even plenty of self-identified anarchists feel the need to leave some room for the “legitimate” or “justified” coercion of minorities. But these constructions just involve a sort of stuttering displacement of the same problem. “Legitimate authority” is just authority that has been authorized. “Justified hierarchy” is just hierarchy that is sanctioned by whatever it is that we imagine sanctions hierarchy. The reigning principle does not change, while the condition for anarchy seems to be precisely a change of principle.
oi.. cancerous distractions
If we look the difficulties square in the face we are confronted with the likelihood that we might continue to have recourse to practices that we think of as “democratic.” It is difficult to imagine a society in which we are not at times forced to subordinate some interests to others, to engage in conflicts from which not everyone can emerge winners, and, in those instances, to engage in practices like voting. That seems unquestionable. But that doesn’t tell us how we should feel about the obvious mismatch between those imposed practices and our principles. And, again, the very thing that inevitability lacks is a connected principle.
not really.. and/or.. why we need a global detox/re\set
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Progress and the Anarchic Series
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On Democracy as a Necessary Anarchist Value – kevin carson 2017
This means a social decision-making process that is permissionless, or stigmergic, insofar as this is possible. The ultimate in democracy, in the sense of a positive-sum maximization of individual agency and control over their lives to the greatest extent possible short of anyone’s agency infringing on anyone else’s, is universal consent of the governed. *And in this sense, a permissionless, stigmergic organization, in which all individual activity is self-chosen, is the ultimate in democracy..t
*to me.. this is curiosity over decision making
33
But in reality “democracy” isn’t something that was invented by a bunch of oversized brains in the Athenian agora, or Philadelphia in 1787. It’s something that ordinary people have been doing everywhere throughout history, and long before the beginning of recorded history, whenever they met one another as equals to solve a common problem through discussion and cooperation. In anthropologist David Graeber’s words:
“In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself. No one could possibly own it. I suppose…one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively. But such speculation is idle; the point is that democratic assemblies can be attested in all times and places, from Balinese seka to Bolivian ayllu, employing an endless variety of formal procedures, and *will always crop up wherever a large group of people sat down together to make a collective decision on the principle that all taking part should have an equal say.
to me.. this is ie of already being in sea world .. ie: i don’t think legit free people would org/gather that way
..Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say? That would be ridiculous. Clearly there have been plenty of egalitarian societies in history— many far more egalitarian than Athens, many that must have existed before 500 BCE—and obviously, they *must have had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions for matters of collective importance. Yet somehow, it is always assumed that these procedures, whatever they might have been, could not have been, properly speaking, “democratic.
*to me.. symptom of being in sea world
34
Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors coincide:
- A feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and
- A coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.
For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will.
problem is in assuming decision making over curiosity.. rest.. feeling of equal say and of need for coercion.. symptoms of dm et al
35
There is some hope, in my opinion, that the nation-state may be be bypassed by *horizontal linkages..t between commons-based local polities, and that such confederalism **can serve as a platform for resistance to the nation-state: especially as traditional nation-states fall under the sway of authoritarian political movements.
*imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
**gershenfeld something else law
*Parallel to this cluster of values centered on unanimous consent and permissionlessness is another value: equal right of access to things which are rightfully governed as a commons, like land and natural resources, aquifers, culture, and information. To the extent that such common goods are replacing large quantities of accumulated physical capital as the main productive forces in society, commons governance means equal access to the commons as a productive asset by all members of society, and the ability to meet a growing share of subsistence needs outside the capitalist wage system..t
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring
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If we understand democracy in this way, it is not only indispensable to anarchy: it is anarchy.
The Regime of Liberty – gabriel amadej
Proudhon categorized democracy as a “regime of liberty” related to its evolutionary successor — anarchy:
“We know the two fundamental and antithetical principles of all governments: authority and liberty.
Regime of Authority:
A) Government of all by one — monarchy or patriarchy;
B) Government of all by all — panarchy or communism.
The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the non-division of power.
Regime of Liberty:
A) Government of all by each — democracy;
B) Government of each by each — an-archy or self-government.
The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the division of power.”.. t
liberty – b)
Oppression comes in all forms. Any exercise of liberty can, in certain conditions, succumb to tyranny
as long as any form of m\a\p
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Markets give people the right of economic exit from the absolutist domain of community, just as the community gives people the right of exit from the cash nexus.
Critical to the survival of anarchy is mutualism: the balance of property and community. The market cannot be free without the commons, and the commons cannot be free without the market..t
oi.. the market cannot be free.. the commons cannot be free w/the market (any form of m\a\p)
Demolish the Demos – grayson english
It is probably easy to understand, then, why so eminent an anarchist thinker as David Graeber would content himself with the conclusion that “anarchism and democracy are—or should be—largely identical (Possibilities, 330).” If we wish to maintain society without the state, isn’t self-organization and self-governance the obvious solution?
possibilities.. ayça on david’s possibilities
Such an approach might be sensible if equality of authority were our only demand. However, while we say that all must be equal in authority, what we actually mean is that all should be equal in having no authority over anyone but themselves, and absolute authority over themselves—individual sovereignty. We do not wish for a world in which all are slaves, but a world in which all are kings. For this reason, even the constitution of a demos is a problem, for it involves, in some sense, the establishment of a center of gravity outside of individuals, which pulls them in toward collective identity and lifeway.
In fact, the demos is the original enemy for an anarchist. It is no coincidence that *once a People have formed, there must emerge mediations of their interests and projects—representation becomes necessary.. t Many thinkers have located representation in many places, from dictators to committees and even more diffuse bodies, and it’s no coincidence that they use democratic language to justify those systems. Since, in the last analysis, it presupposes the annihilation of the individual in the collective, and since it is a public-oriented politics, it follows that there are many potentially popular governmental systems.
*marsh label law et al.. siddiqi border law et al.. constant line law.. et al
Once confronted with this antagonism—between individual sovereignty and democracy—one might note that for all our talk, humans are social beings and “a life apart” seems either inconceivable or miserable. Democracy might be an indispensable part of an ongoing dialectic between the individual and the social. But this, I think, mistakes the nature of our aim. What we should seek is not compromise. Equality of authority at zero differs fundamentally from equality of authority at some positive point. The social should exist, ultimately, as the facilitator of individuality, and not as a force to be respected in itself. Our lives are intractably social, that much is true; but the social should exist to make room for the individual, and not vice versa. Societies should not be free, societies should not be considered as interested partners to individuals.
neither direction.. (and/or both directions simultaneous).. the non binary ness of small is {ginormous} beautiful ness et al.. brown belonging law.. maté trump law.. via imagine if we ness.. 1st thing every day
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Anarchism as Radical Liberalism: Radicalizing Markets, Radicalizing Democracy
41
At protest marches, leftist activists often chant “Tell me what democracy looks like!” to which their comrades respond “This is what democracy looks like!” In a sense, they are right. Protests reflect people with various views expressing their opinions in the open. They reflect a society in which contestation is possible to at least some degree. And it is telling that even formally democratic states send police officers to bludgeon, beat, and otherwise violently repress protesters and the journalists who report on them.
If democracy is characterized by openness, then the ballot box is not the epitome of democracy. Instead, democracy is defined by those who, from the bottom up, contribute to an open society. People who film police and expose their crimes do this. Journalists who investigate powerful people, debate ideas, and keep the free press alive embody democracy. Tell me what democracy looks like? It looks like whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, and Daniel Ellsberg making the state’s previously secret crimes public.
good for pluralistic ignorance et al.. as long as still in sea world.. but in legit free ness.. cancerous distractions
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Politics and Anarchist Ideals
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Response to Goodman – gillis
45
People like getting to vote on their neighbors’ lives. They like the sense of belonging and power that comes with participation in collective domination. There might be slight inclinations towards some aspects of the ideal of openness, but for the most part people are driven by a hunger for participatory tyranny. Scratch your local “grassroots” politician or democratic activist and you’ll find someone who’d be a busybody in any context. The causes they latch onto may sometimes be just and even heartfelt, but underneath remains an intense need to have a say in the lives of other people. Were the big evil they’re campaigning against removed, most of them would find new evils in the length of their neighbor’s lawn.
people telling other people what to do.. any form of m\a\p
coming from khan filling the gaps law.. et al.. which comes from missing pieces
need a nother way for 8b to live.. for (blank)’s sake
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Embracing the Antinomies
50
Formality, Collectivity and Anarchy – derek wittorff
Some people aren’t disempowered by meetings, discussions, or a lack of obviously perceivable impact from their own individual participation, etc. While we prefer agency to structure, we cannot deny that some level of structure (even if it is only informal and ad hoc) is necessary to produce agency. For some, agency might be translated from formal structures. If someone is passionate about the work they do, and find agency in performing the work, but requires a formal structure and long meetings to self-manage the division of labor, we can’t say it’s going to come at the cost of that person’s agency since it’s a matter of subjectivity.
whalespeak.. if none of us are free ness.. oi
51
I agree that making friends and conjuring a sense of belonging to a community isn’t a means of spreading anarchy outside the anarchist community, but providing “altruism and empathy” within that community is useful. Meetings and structured socializing time are definitely not best the way to do this. Regardless, in terms of expanding anarchy outside our immediate groups, in order to have the greatest altruistic impact, sometimes collective goals that are decidedly not just collaborative networks of individuals are necessary when the need is particularly unique or demanding. Collective direct action isn’t always characterized by collaborative networks.
oi
52
We could definitely imagine a society in which there is a robust digital commons, and all productive needs supplied by a collaborative p2p network of individual producers, but many currently do not have the means. At the same time we all have short-term needs that must be satisfied. This may come at the cost of maintaining structural capital, and listening to “piles of other people speak one at a time,” while still having a horizontal structure or network between such collectives. Think of it as a trade-off:..t not one sacrificing sociological principles, but definitely costing something in terms of economics. If it’s more than a short-term need, but some idealistic desire, the cost of maintaining the structural capital of a formal organization may be an option. Producing the components or the finished product of some kind of experimental propulsion system that could revolutionize how we travel may not be effectively coordinated through p2p collaboration. It may require a definite, formal, and large organization (somewhere along the structure of production from raw materials to finished product) to produce.
today have means to no longer need trade offs et al.. for (blank)’s sake
If this is too abstract, let me try a more contemporary example in movement building. If there’s a union shop of thirty workers that want to join and collaborate with a general network that characterizes a general strike, that union shop itself isn’t going to operate by informal decision making. They’re going to need a form of collective decision making on what resources to request, how best to participate etc.
all these ie’s are symptoms of sea world.. so just whalespeak
It should also be understood that even in contexts of collective decision making — consensus-based or not — there are layers of collaborative networks that are going to exist.
because.. decision making ness et al.. so still in sea world
53
Point being, is there an unresolvable tension between collaborative networks and collective decisionmaking in principle?
no.. because collab ness assumption makes them same song to begin with.. oi
Response to Wittorff – william gillis
Consensus should ideally be a test applied that dissolves associations and discourages persistent groups just as much as it facilitates the discovery of affinities or detentes.
i’d call that curiosity not consensus..
I agree, of course, that we can expect people in a free world to sacrifice some level of agency for the reassurances of persistent structures. And there are certainly problems of economies of scale and externalities in our immediate world that will require all manner of trade-offs, as I openly admitted in my opening essay. There will certainly be situations where accomplishing a task is only possible if people stick together. My point here is that people should consciously decide whether that is the case, and whether the task is worth it. The default right now is almost always to assume that every undertaking requires sticking together in some group, and that such a course of action is worth it. I think we need a much stronger skepticism about the necessity of sticking together, much less in persistent organizations. We must get over our deep-seated fear of disassociation for anarchy to ever flourish.
Where Derek starts to lose me is in treating “agency” like an emotional affect subjective to each person. While the quantification of agency in particular cases is truly forbidding, we can nevertheless speak with some substance of it. An agent locked in a small room from which no information or causal influence escapes clearly has a maximum limit to their agency. And we can clearly say that an agent locked in a bigger box, all other things being equal, has more possible agency. They can do more things. They have more choices and more of the universe is contingent upon their thoughts. (As anarchists we obviously want to go much further than longer chains. *We want no chains — the ultimate end of infinite freedom.) Similarly, an agent with 1 bit of information about their world and what choices are available to them has less agency than an agent with 2 bits of information about the same.
that’s why not consensus.. et al.. (any form of m\a\p).. oi
**then have to let go of choice ness.. of any form of m\a\p
54
It is in this sense that we can say that everyone is disempowered by meetings, regardless of whether they recognize it or not. This is because the meeting form is poorly structured and deeply inefficient at processing information.
rather.. the idea/assumption that we should be about processing info is whalespeak
I think that Wittorff misrepresents my advocacy of fluid networks when he starts talking about “informal groups.” Firstly, my whole post-leftist point here is one about being deeply critical of groups themselves. But secondly, the associations he invokes with “informal” are those of things like friendship groups. Informality may sometimes offer a certain fluidity but it isn’t the path to fluidity I’m advocating. Informal groups are often just everything wrong with groups themselves with the added benefit of being opaque. Similarly to how informal power structures are often just everything wrong with power structures plus an increased resilience against liberation.
again.. all this groups ness.. whalespeak
need in a space ness via imagine if we ness
I am not advocating informality (nor rejecting it per se) here, I’m advocating fluidity. It’s a tragedy that explicitness has become so deeply associated with rigidity today. Indeed, the promise of consensus process for anarchists is that it can offer a way to be explicit about our fluid associations.
infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
no need to be explicit
Individualist Anarchism vs. Social Anarchism – wayne price
55
As a description of reality, this is false. There are and can be no individuals without society. Grayson could not think without using language—a social product.
oi.. perhaps not think like a whale.. oi..
Compare Grayson’s views with those of Bakunin (passages quoted in Brian Morris, Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom, 1993):
“…Natural society [is] the real starting point of all human civilization and the only medium in which the personality and liberty of man can really be born and grow….Man…only realizes his individual liberty or personality by integration with all the individuals around him and virtue of the collective power of society….Man in isolation can have no awareness of his liberty. *Being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man and by all the men around him. **Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection…”
(pp. 88—89; note use of “man” to mean “humanity”)*oh my.. brown belonging law et al.. not determinant on acknowledgement
**need to let go of binary ness
Grayson agrees that the collective does exist, even under anarchism, in between its dissolving into isolated individuals, when serving as a “springboard” for human atoms. Therefore it is reasonable to ask him, *how will the collective be organized during these periods? How will individuals control how these (unfortunately **necessary if temporary) collectives function? ***Down through the millennia, hunter-gatherer groups, villages, clans, and other associations have often used communal discussions, consensus, voting, choosing specialists by lot or group decision, or similar methods—democracy. But Grayson rejects democracy. What then?
if *org around legit needs.. **collective functioning ness.. not necessary (aka: if out of sea world)
***just ongoing from forever .. ie’s of whales in sea world..
He does not tell us what he would do. He does say he rejects democracy and wants “kings” and that he regards the “demos” (the collective people) as “the enemy.” Of course he does not advocate dictatorship. But what then? If no one can tell me what to do, not even the most radically-democratic socialist people, then I must be the king. It is the logical conclusion of rejecting democracy, even if it contradicts the very goals which Grayson wants to achieve.
we have no idea what legit free people are like.. ie: the dance
In brief, Grayson comes up against the same problem that all the other anarchists who reject democracy (leaving aside the many who advocate democratic procedures but do not use the term “democracy”) encounter. *Given that people do live in society, that cooperation is a necessary part of living, that production and consumption of necessary goods requires group activities—then there has to be some way of organizing these procedures that provides the maximum of individual freedom and control from below. Those anarchists who reject democracy generally remain on a high and abstract level of philosophy. They do not say what they would actually do! What could this be but some sort of radical democracy?
*oi.. whalespeak
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Comments on the Other Lead Essays – kevin carson
In “The Regime of Liberty,” Gabriel Amadej advocates the Proudhonian ideal – reflected in the dictum “property is liberty” – of some individual sphere of last resort where means of subsistence are secure from the will of the majority:
“Democracy disrupts this balance and places society under the unaccountable domain of community. An individual’s means of survival thus came to depend entirely on one’s reputation with one’s neighbours. It is, as Proudhon said, the rule of all by all, which includes every individual involved in that sum.
It is under this condition that Proudhon proclaimed that community, too, is theft. Yet never, in any of his works, did he declare that community is liberty. Despite the fact that, just as he famously declared that property is theft, he also declared property to be liberty. Community was just much a problem, an enigma, as property itself….
because we don’t know how to commune like legit free people..
“Property is liberty” when labour controls its own product and individuals are sovereign over their means of survival. This is a counterbalance to the absolutist domain of community. If this dimension of property becomes a totalizing force, the regime of liberty suffers again.
We can say that pure democracy threatens to make the domain of community universal, while capitalism likewise threatens to make the domain of property universal. Under both regimes, liberty suffers. Anarchy is neither capitalism nor communism. It is self-government; the absolute sovereignty of the individual.
We should not desire a society where every good is bought and sold under the cash nexus. Neither should we desire a society where one’s access to resources is determined by one’s neighbour’s good will.
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring
This dichotomy needs a resolution, and that resolution is Proudhonian mutualism….
Critical to the survival of anarchy is mutualism: the balance of property and community. The market cannot be free without the commons, and the commons cannot be free without the market.”
The commons, in my opinion, is itself an institution for synthesizing community with liberty.. t It is a sort of platform, outside the realm of state politics. Unconditional equal access rights to the commons amount to inalienable control over one’s livelihood.
if legit common\ing.. if legit unconditional ness.. access w/o judgment.. et al
to org/facil that chaos.. need: ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling
It may be objected that one’s right of access to the commons depends on the goodwill of one’s neighbors. But by that standard, there is no form of possession or property right that does not depend on the willingness of neighbors to recognize and enforce. Any form of organization in an anarchist society ultimately assumes that a majority of the community are of good will and good faith, and willing to adhere to agreed-upon rules. In fact the philosophy of anarchism itself juxtaposes certain assumptions about human nature – the ability of human beings to organize society around peaceful agreement – against the Hobbesian assumption that a state is necessary to impose peace and order.
have to assume everyone of good will.. otherwise it won’t work..
huge – sans any form of m\a\p
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I think that what Gabriel wants to avoid is “politics” in the sense of one’s rights and livelihood being constantly imperiled by majoritarian politics. We can achieve this by substituting another kind of democracy – organized around the commons, and the transformation of the state into a networked platform – that amounts to the neutral and routinized “administration of things.” Such commons governance is arguably at least as automatic and apolitical as routinized enforcement of property claims in a court system.
In “Democracy, Anarchism, & Freedom,” Wayne Price argues that “anarchism is democracy without the state”; i.e., that “anarchism is the most extreme, radical, form of democracy”:
“I see both “democracy” and “anarchism” as requiring decision-making by the people, from the bottom-up, through cooperation, clashes of opinion, social experimentation, and group intelligence.
oi.. decision making is unmooring.. is a cancerous distraction
But “democracy” means collective decision-making. It does not apply to matters which are of individual or minority concern only, such as individual sexual orientation, religion, or artistic taste. Free choice should rule here, whatever the majority thinks.”
thinking we have to limit ourselves to choice.. rather than ie: curiosity.. is the killer..
And unlike bourgeois or capitalist democracy, those like Wayne who see anarchism as the ultimate in democracy advocate democratic control over the economy (“[f]or example, a federation of worker-run industries, consumer co-ops, and collective communes”).
He also notes that even professed “anti-democratic” anarchists nevertheless:
“…advocate “self-rule,” “self-governing,” and “self-management.” These terms are no different than “direct democracy” and “participatory democracy.”
oi
If everyone is involved in governing (participatory democracy), then there is no government—no special institution over society which rules people. Anarchists are not against all social coordination, community decision-making, and protection of the people. They are generally for some sort of association of workplace committees and neighborhood assemblies. They are for the replacement of the police and military by an armed people (a democratic militia, so long as that is necessary). This is the self-organization of the people—of the former working class and oppressed population, until the heritage of class divisions and oppression has been dissolved into a united population.”
oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi oi
So those of us who see anarchism as the ultimate in democracy, as I do, define “democracy” in terms of non-coercive governance – a value shared even by most anarchists who dislike the word “democracy” as such.
any form of democratic admin.. cancerous distraction
Wayne uses the example of a community decision on whether or not to build a road to examine the question of whether non-state democratic governance entails domination of some sort.
“Does this radical democracy still mean the coercion or domination of some people by others? Let us imagine an industrial-agricultural commune under anarchism. Some member proposes that it build a new road. People have differing opinions. A decision will have to be made; either the road will be built or it won’t (this is coercion by reality, not by the police). Suppose a majority of the assembly decides in favor of road-building. A minority disagrees. Perhaps it is outvoted (under majority rule). Or perhaps it decides to “stand aside” so as not to “block consensus” (under a consensus system).
i don’t think this is what legit free people would be about.. .. so me this is all just whalespeak
Is the minority coerced? Its members have participated fully in the community discussions which led up to the decision. *They have been free to argue for their viewpoint. They have been able to organize themselves (in a caucus or “party”) to fight against building the road. In the end, the minority members retain full rights. They may be in the majority on the next issue. (Of course, dissatisfied members may leave the community and go elsewhere. But other communities also have to decide whether to build roads.)
*oi.. oh my..
The minority may be said to have been coerced on this road-building issue, but I do not see this situation as one of domination. It is not like a white majority consistently dominating its African-American minority. In a state-less system of direct democracy, all participate in decision-making, even if all individuals are not always satisfied with the outcome. *In any case, the aim of anarchism is not to end absolutely all coercion, but to reduce coercion to the barest minimum possible. Institutions of domination must be abolished and replaced by bottom-up democratic-libertarian organization. But there will never be a perfect society. This is why I began by defining “anarchism” as a society without the state, capitalism, or other institutions of domination.”
*oh my
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Now this contention that anarchism is about minimizing coercion, and not eliminating it altogether, is likely to be challenged by many anarchists. But if we break down the issues here, we may find that even what at first appears to be a minimal level of coercion may be a phantom.
any form of m\a\p.. phantom ish or not.. means doing something wrong (for conditions of legit free people)
A lot of it hinges, first of all, on the material effect of the majority decision on the minority, after the vote is taken. Is the road to be built on an existing right of way that is common property, or on a route that doesn’t encroach on someone’s existing possessions? Is it to be built with natural resources that are a democratically governed commons? Is the labor to be contributed by willing participants, with no conscription of labor from the unwilling or levies of food and other material means of support from the unwilling?
to me.. these wouldn’t be issues of legit free people.. in hari rat park
Second, what is the nature of the *social unit making the decision, and what is the relationship of the majority and minority voters to it? As I noted in my own initial contribution to this symposium, when an indivisible asset or resource is being discussed, or a simple up-or-down decision that can’t be broken down into smaller parts, and when a unitary body is making the decision – when some decision is necessary, and it will of necessity affect everyone in an indivisible decision-making unit – the outcome is generally not regarded as coercive. For example, when the roommates sharing an apartment adhere to a majority decision on how to set the thermostat in the living room, the minority who consider the resulting temperature too cold or too hot have not been coerced.
So depending on the answers to all these questions, it is quite possible to address governance issues (like whether to build a road) by majority decision *without anyone being subject to coercion.
*any raised eyebrow.. red flag.. any form of m\a\p.. cancerous distractions
The second question I raised above may have at least some bearing on the distinction Shawn Wilbur raises in his contribution, “Anarchy and Democracy: Examining the Divide,” between the realm of authority and the realm characterized by the anarchic principle. That is, whether a social unit can be governed democratically and still be characterized by “social relations free from hierarchy, claims of authority and the various types of exploitation that seem to inevitably arise from them” depends in large part on the nature of the social unit itself, and its members’ relationships with it.
any form of democratic admin et al
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If the members are viewed primarily as atomistic individuals in an amorphous, unstructured larger social body, in which any *agreement between members of society is on an ad hoc, issue-by-issue basis, then a decision taken may be viewed as a coercive imposition on them. On the other hand if the members are viewed as members of a common enterprise, or going concern, with internal bylaws, things take on a different character. For example in a medieval European open-field village, in which the land is treated as a common unit and the village as a corporate body, the allocation of furlong strips between families on a year-to-year basis is not an act of coercion (as opposed to an action by the state against property held on a fee simple basis, in a system operating on Lockean assumptions). **The question of what is “coercive” or “authoritarian” can only be answered by resorting to the question of what are the fundamental component social units of the society.
*rather.. ie: in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
and
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
to me.. legit free people wouldn’t need to be making agreements et al
**rather.. both are same song.. need units to be like infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
If social functions can be organized through some combination of commons governance within corporate bodies (*for example land and natural resources), self-selected collectives or stigmergic networks, and market exchange, then we may have a state of affairs where “society” as such comes to bear on the individual only insofar as she is co-owner of a democratically-governed common resource, or some self-selected cooperative body, and **in no case operates directly on her through any sort of claimed police power for initiating force. It is a virtually pure expression of “collective force” in which “relations remain strictly horizontal.”
*rather.. imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
**that happens with any form of m\a\p.. structural violence.. spiritual violence.. a raised eyebrow.. et al
And if the only institutional structure co-extensive with society as a whole, or overlapping with most of it, is something along the lines of Orsini’s and Bauwens’s Partner State – to recur to that concept once again – that functions as a support platform, coordinated by the various resource commons and *voluntary associations that choose to participate in maintaining it, then it follows that its only relationship to the individual is mediated by the natural resource commons or voluntary collectivities to which she belongs.
I confess to finding myself generally at odds with William Gillis’s approach, in “The Abolition Of Rulership Or The Rule Of All Over All,” of argument by definition. *His argument seems to hinge on a dogmatic assertion, based largely on etymology, that democracy “really means” majoritarian tyranny. From this it follows that anarchists who emphasize the liberatory strands within the historical composite of “democracy” are guilty of “orwellianism” or pandering.
*all arguments do.. all whalespeak
I’ve long objected, for similar reasons (arbitrary argumentation from definition) to “post-Left anarchism.” It’s a circular argument that starts out by defining “Left” in terms of the most objectionable characteristics of the stereotypical Old Left – workerism, focus on organizational coordination and mass, etc. – and then defining anything out of it, like decentralist or anti-authoritarian strands of the Left, that’s inconsistent with that stereotype. So anything that doesn’t smack of vanguardism and trudging masses in overalls isn’t “really Left.”
This strikes me as being nearly as *fruitless as the Bircher argument that the United States is “a republic not a democracy” based on dogmatic, essentialist definitions of “republic” and “democracy.”
*not just fruitless.. cancerous distractions.. for (blank)’s sake
Referring to other conceptions of democracy as “an uphill battle to redefine” it is begging the question. “Democracy” has connotated face-to-face participation by equals in governance where a common decision is necessary, and the right to a say in matters affecting oneself, since the beginning. Focusing on those aspects of the term in considering its relation to anarchy is not “redefining it.”
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In fact *I agree with William in celebrating liberatory technologies like weapons that shift the advantage to the defense, networked communications, and the emergence of a detente (like left-libertarian, possession-based property norms) from the mutual veto power of individuals. But for me, these things are the ultimate in genuine democracy. And the society I’ve described at various points, of an overlapping series of natural resource commons, self-selected stigmergic networks, voluntary production collectives, etc., **horizontally cooperating to maintain a “Partner State” as a non-coercive mutual infrastructure, is the ultimate in William’s “consensus society… comprised of autonomous realms.” And the various opt-in affiliations in such a society are perfectly described by William’s “collectivity” that is “organic and ad hoc,” with “an unterrified attitude about dissolution and reformation.”
*celebrating weapons??
**oi.. not non coercive.. not voluntary.. not stigmergic
This, I think, is what many anarchists have long meant by “democracy,” and recognizing that as a legitimate sense of the term requires no “redefinition” nor violence to its meaning.
to me.. thinking we need meaning ness is a big part of spiritual violence et al
I also agree entirely with William’s caveat against fetishizing collective decisionmaking itself. There are indeed “many pragmatic contexts” that require it under some circumstances – mostly natural monopolies like sharing the same groundwater or other resource which must be commonly governed – I have always enthusiastically promoted stigmergic, permissionless organization wherever it is feasible, and celebrated technologies which facilitate stigmergic organization and reduce the need for institutional coordination. My current book project is a critique of Old Left organizational models that lionize large, hierarchical institutions and emphasize the need to get everybody on the same page to do anything.
for that.. need to let go of any form of m\a\p
I’ve also long objected to the mindset that equates meetings and slogan-shouting crowds with “activism”; this is basically a cargo cult approach that takes the incidents of activism as its essentials, without regard to their functional significance or their relevance to a given situation. My enthusiastic support for Occupy was based on the fact – for which it was uniformly criticized by the verticalist usual suspects – of not centrally formulating demands and appointing spokespersons. Occupy was so effective precisely because it was a stigmergic support platform, or toolkit, which could be used in a permissionless manner by the wide variety of nodes participating in it. It functioned in the same “bazaar” model as open-source software, the file-sharing movement, Wikipedia and Al Qaeda – any innovation developed by any node immediately became part of the entire network’s toolkit, available to be used by any other node or not entirely at its discretion.
Organizations built on this model have what strategist John Boyd called “short OODA loops”: they are able to assess feedback from the results of their own previous actions, act on it, assess the feedback from that, and so forth, many times faster than hierarchies that require consensus..t The result is that they innovate with the speed of replicating yeast, and run circles around the dinosaur hierarchies they contend with.
ooda loop ness
makes no diff as long as feedback loop is broken.. aka: as long as still in sea world
rather.. need ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling for global detox/re\set
As for the idea of “democracy as a say in the things that affect you,” I think it’s a distortion to frame it as a positive right to actions by others that benefit you (e.g. a date with your crush, your social group’s decision re snapchat, etc.). It’s far more charitable (and consistent with actual historic usage), in my opinion, to use it in a sense similar to William’s mutual veto power and resulting detente.
Regarding Graeber’s purported equation of democracy to the “rabble” or “mob,” I’m totally at a loss. I’ve read The Democracy Project, as well as a considerable amount of his other corpus that touch on the subject, and I can’t recall seeing anything remotely like this. To the extent that he discusses democracy as a historic phenomenon, it’s always in a concrete, situationally embedded context comparable to Kropotkin’s folkmotes and Colin Ward’s building societies, or Ostrom’s common pool resource governance – about as far as you can get from mass democracy.
the democracy project.. colin ward.. ostrom 8 et al
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Derek Wittorff, in “Democracy: Self-Government or Systemic Powerlessness?” likewise starts by arguing from a definition of democracy as majoritarianism, and proposing consensus in its stead. This strikes me as ironic, given that David Graeber treated consensus as his favored model of democracy throughout The Democracy Project, and William previously tarred Graeber with “mobocracy.”
I’m not going to address Derek’s definitional issues; to a large extent it would be revisiting ground I already covered. Suffice it to say I see consensus within self-selected nodes as very much a form of democracy.
What’s more interesting is that Derek mates consensus *decision-making with a network-node model of federalism, with consensus taking place only at the **smallest level .. t at which ***agreement and collective action are actually necessary, and mostly within nodes which are self-selected collectives. I agree with this approach.
*decision making is unmooring us law.. public consensus always oppresses someone(s).. et al
**today we have means for a smaller level.. ie: curiosity over decision making.. infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness.. and we’re missing it
***rendering ***agreement .. collective action ness.. unnecessary.. and irrelevant and cancerous distractions
Nathan Goodman’s approach of democracy as openness, in “Anarchism as Radical Liberalism,” seems similar in spirit to mine. The Partner State approach of Orsini and Bauwens has also been described as “open source government.” The description Goodman quotes from Don Lavoie – “a kind of distributed intelligence, not representable by any single organization which may claim to act on society’s behalf” – also coincides closely with the Partner State model (at least as I have developed it in this forum).
oi.. intellect ness only perpetuates sea world.. not legit free people.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. graeber can’t know law et al
rather.. ‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
In Lavoie’s framework, democracy is not something expressed through a state with a monopoly on the use of force, or through elections to decide what such a state will do. Instead, democracy occurs through open discourse, debate, contestation, and interaction among citizens. To borrow a concept from the Ostroms, democracy rightly understood is polycentric rather than monocentric.
but not poly enough for all/any of us to be free
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
As an anarchist without adjectives, and therefore reticent about promoting any single organizational model as the schema for an anarchist society, I would take it a step beyond celebrating the stigmergic character or openness of markets in particular. There is an almost infinite variety of means by which individuals can constitute horizontal relationships within nodes, and nodes can constitute horizontal relationships in a larger society, and Nathan’s comments regarding openness apply to all of them as well as to markets.
need no words as label(s).. not just adjectives..
ie: ai as nonjudgmental expo labeling et al
My differences with Grayson English (“Demolish the Demos”) cover much of the same ground I’ve already covered above in critiquing William’s argument from definition, so I’ll limit myself to what’s unique to Grayson’s argument. Getting from Graeber’s treatment of “self-organization and self-governance” to the constitution of a demos or People – let alone “the annihilation of the individual in the collective” – seems to leave out a lot of intermediate steps, with no indication that Graeber himself had any intention of following that path.
In my reading, Graeber’s model of consensus democracy at the local level is fully compatible with Toni Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s “multitude,” which they directly oppose to unitary or monolithic conceptions like “the People,” “the masses,” or “the proletariat.” The defining characteristic of multitude is its internal heterogeneity, its status as a “legion” composed by a near infinite number of individuals and nodes horizontally related to each other. And Negri and Hardt (although Multitude predated the Occupy movement) explicitly pointed to stigmergic, networked movements like the post-Seattle movement as examples of the multitude.
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Jessica Flanagan, in her lead essay, also takes an approach of *arguing from definition; in her case, by defining democracy as the equal right of everyone in society “to determine how political acts of violence will be used and whether and when they and their compatriots will be coerced.”
*arguing/definition ness.. already cancerous distractions.. act of violence.. et al
But as I have already argued, “equal authority” set at a common value of zero, resulting in the kinds of mutual vetoes and detente that William describes, are fully compatible with the spirit of democracy.
Democracy, as such, does not at all necessarily entail a political “tyranny of the majority” through majority control over a coercive state. It can be expressed through self-governance in the wide range of self-constituted bodies and associations discussed above.
Jessica writes: “In ideal theory, collective decisions should be made in ways that minimize the domination of all people and promote openness and human freedom.” I fully agree with her that the need for collective decisions should be minimized, and relegated to those situations (like the governance of shared natural resources) where a single policy is required. The great bulk of social organization should be permissionless and opt-in. For me that maximizes the value of consent, which – as I stated in my lead essay – is the central value of democracy as I understand it.
in ideal.. (and possible in practicality today as well).. decision making et al.. irrelevant s
so if want to be legit free.. need to let go
Jessica goes on to express skepticism as to whether mechanisms for collective decision-making without domination are even possible..t She considers markets as equally problematic with the state insofar as they require a social consensus on property conventions. In that regard I don’t think the dependence of property rights on consensus can ever be escaped, because there is no particular property rights regime that can be directly or self-evidently deduced from natural rights without the intermediation of custom, convention, and expediency.
good girl.. need to let go of any form of m\a\p.. decision making is unmooring us.. cancerously distracting us
Response to Carson – william gillis
Kevin objects to my focus on the etymology of “democracy” and brings up the post-left distancing from “the left” as something he finds similarly arbitrary.
This is not a symposium on the post-left and certainly that term of self-identification has been increasingly appropriated by reactionaries, but it’s important to note that the original post-left argument for anarchists to distance ourselves from “the left” was the opposite of some kind of etymological argument that appealed to relatively fixed underlying meanings. One doesn’t have to positively assert that “the left” is any single thing to urge anarchists to avoid identifying with it. Certainly there are bespoke definitions of “the left” out there that anarchism is reconcilable with if not synonymous with — the point however is that “the left” has no fixed center of mass; it’s an incredibly arbitrary and amorphous category that gets assigned to any manner of things. “The left” is defined solely by its associations — and for a significant fraction of the world those associations are bureaucracy, totalitarianism, centralism, collectivism, paternalism, and Luddism. Over a century of slaughter and repression, authoritarians have thoroughly poisoned the well of “the left” and there is no clear reason why we should continue fighting for the term.
passing from carson to willis.. realizing this is defn babble.. oi…. guessing have to do that to be a writer.. but to be legit free? thinking not..
This is in stark contrast with “anarchism” which contains an etymological center of mass: a very clear definition that it’s almost impossible for the term to shake. Certainly the associations of “anarchy” in the general public are quite negative, but the tension between the core etymology of “without rulership” and the general associations of “dog-eat-dog” constitutes an Orwellianism that has had a huge impact upon our world’s language and discourse. The definition of “anarchy” must be challenged if we are to have any hope of being able to speak of a world without rulership without people immediately transmuting that into a world of fractured rulership.
whoa.. what i just said.. defn babble ness.. oi.. need to quit trying to speak/define/write of things.. and try a legit nother way
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Anarchists have always played with words and definitions. Proudhon’s “anarchy is order” was at least as provocative as “the left is authoritarianism” or “democracy is the rule of all over all,” however there were reasons that Proudhon chose that linguistic fight. Clear etymology holds a different and often stronger kind of weight than looser political or social associations.
cancerous distraction.. graeber model/revolution law.. et al
But even if you write off the etymology of democracy entirely (while clinging onto the etymology of anarchy), it’s generally good practice to assign our most basic words to the most basic concepts. “The rule of all over all” is a very basic concept — useful and distinct — whereas “face-to-face participation by equals in governance where a common decision is necessary, and the right to a say in matters affecting oneself” is a much more complex, arbitrary, and also indistinct concept. I also object to Kevin’s claim that such a definition has been true since the beginning — “democracy” has much more wildly varying connotations and definitions across time, some of which are quite negative.
rather .. perhaps we try idiosyncratic jargon ness
I also want to reiterate yet again that “the right to a say in matters affecting oneself” is often a bad thing. There are plenty of matters that affect you that you should have no say over. Even the barest consideration should make this blindingly apparent. You shouldn’t get a say in whether scientific knowledge that will change the world is released by the discoverer. You shouldn’t get a say in whether your crush chooses to date someone else. Kevin wants to split things up between the shitty versions of “a say in matters affecting oneself” and the more positive versions, but my whole point is that I think that distinction is a hard one to make without the clear underlying conceptual distinction of rulership versus the absence of rulership. I think the value of “anarchy” helps us navigate that complex boundary, whereas stitching in that boundary on top of the labored, complicated definition of democracy Kevin gave only makes the term more arbitrary.
need to quit thinking we have to navigate things..
again.. ‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al
Kevin optimistically claims that my call for “an unterrified attitude about dissolution and reformation” is what anarchists have long meant by democracy, *but this flies utterly in the face of my near two decades of experience as an activist and organizer. Almost no anarchist project or organization I’ve ever been a part of has had anything but absolute terror and repulsion towards the prospect of dissolution. Almost every organization or group longs to perpetuate itself, even those ostensibly post-leftist projects often worship a singular notion of the project or group above a responsive attention to the agency of the individuals involved.
*because in sea world
no idea/reflection of what legit free people are like – black science of people/whales law et al
I generally run with mainstream insurrectionary anarchists who consider the sort of majoritarianism found with, say, the IWW to be horrifying and embarrassing, and yet while they use consensus instead, they still almost without exception fall into the same static ruts.
Would that Occupy had truly been “a stigmergic support platform, or toolkit, which could be used in a permissionless manner by the wide variety of nodes participating in it.” That’s the lovely promise of anarchist notions of consensus! But it’s a promise repeatedly betrayed and murdered by the misaligned values propagated by “democracy”.
again .. everything we try will just end up same song till we get out of sea world..
hari rat park law et al.. for (blank)’s sake
Reply to Kevin Carson and William Gillis – derek wittorff
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What’s interesting enough about this division is how those who think that democracy and anarchy are very compatible also believe that consensus is the equivalent to democracy. I’ve heard this before, and I’m sure there’s a history to explain this, but the structural forms are quite different. That alone makes it a pressing and important definitional issue.
oi.. why not yet ness.. graeber model law et al..
In ultimatum, while anarchy and freedom are intimately related concepts, the principled basis of my criticism of democracy as an anarchist revolves around the problems of hierarchy, not rigidity per se. Eliminating the hierarchy of majoritarian democracy eliminates a vast amount of the rigidity that I’m concerned with. We want to maximize freedom, but not dream of some utopia of *absolute freedom..t My aim was not to value unanimity of an association over fluidity, or rather structure over agency, but I do want to hold unanimity as a value equal to fluidity. I don’t want people valuing persistency of collective decisionmaking over what that is supposed to accrue for every individual. If the scale is too great, and meetings do take up too much time, that again is really up to the individual to decide. There is no point in holding a value of scale above freedom unless we are talking about accumulating social capital. Either way, I’m not seeing **any sort of coercion, or forced association, when we talk about this “formal consensus” model because **it’s non-hierarchical..t
oh my.. *part\ial ness is killing us..
‘partial freedom is no freedom’ – krishnamurti
and today we have the means to get there.. for (blank)’s sake
and just.. **oh my.. public consensus (any form of m\a\p) always oppresses someone(s)
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Further Response on Democratic Anarchism – wayne price
But we live in a world of interconnected industries and technologies, in small and large communities. Anarchists wish to decentralize those communities and technologies and to redevelop them for human scale and the self-management of the working people. *But we cannot hope for a totally non-centralized, individualized, society, each on his or her own. It wouldn’t work..t **This means that there must be some sort of collective, cooperative, decisionmaking mechanisms..t (Of course, as I said, there are all sorts of issues which are outside of collective decision-making: choice of religion, sexual practices, taste in art, etc. These are the decisions of individuals or small groups. Anarchists have always defended them against majorities.)
oh my oh my oh my.. *whalespeak (graeber rethink law et al.. we have no idea what legit free people are like).. perpetuating **already cancer.. oi.. this is why we have no idea.. we haven’t let go enough to to see.. (why we haven’t yet.. etal)
black science of people/whales law.. hari rat park law
‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
Since some form of collectivity is necessary in many areas, then what form of (necessary) decision-making is most consistent with freedom?.. t Surely it can only be democratic processes, especially small-group, direct, face-to-face democracy, organized into decentralized federations.
if want legit freedom.. need to try curiosity over decision making
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
Does this mean that the majority will “dominate,” “coerce,” or “rule” over the minority, as the other writers insist? No. The traditional definition of democracy is “majority rule, with respect for the rights of the minority.” If everyone does not get to hear every view, including the views of those who end up in the minority, then the majority cannot be said to really have made a free decision, that is, to really be a democratic majority. This is precisely the situation under bourgeois democracy, where radical views are excluded from the public discussion, denied the ability to reach the mass of people. (The problem with bourgeois democracy is not that the majority “rules,” but that the majority is duped into supporting a minority—the ruling capitalist class.)
public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
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Under anarchist direct democracy, this whole notion of a majority ruling over and oppressing a minority is a meaningless abstraction. Sure, those in the minority on this issue may feel coerced—on this one issue. But they fully participated in the democratic process. They are not oppressed as a minority, as African-Americans are under white supremacy.
oi.. public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
Shawn Wilbur postulates an ideal vision of anarchy where no one coerces anyone else in even the most indirect way. No one tells anyone else what to do. This he counterposes to even the most radically democratic decentralized socialism. On the other hand, *he apparently recognizes that such a completely individualized society would not work in some (many? most?) cases, at least not for a lengthy “transitional” period of increasing freedom. Therefore, he seems to say, in practice it will be necessary to use democratic methods, including voting. I do not agree with this sort of sharp division between the ideal and practice. But in practice, what would he do that is different from what I would do? **A difference which makes no difference is no difference.
*doesn’t work because still in sea world.. hari rat park law et al
**yep.. same song.. everything we’ve tried to date
It is possible to find statements against democracy by many anarchists (although the same ones often use “self-management,” “self-government,” or similar terms which are synonymous with democracy). I first learned my anarchism from reading Paul Goodman, probably the most influential anarchist of the sixties. He repeatedly presented his anarchism as consistent with the ideal of democracy, including the democratic tradition from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey.
oi.. ie’s for freedom are slave holders?
Thomas Jefferson enslaved over 600 human beings throughout the course of his life. 400 people were enslaved at Monticello; the other 200 people were held in bondage on Jefferson’s other properties. At any given time, around 130 people were enslaved at Monticello.
et al
Social, but Still Not Democratic – shawn wilbur
As long as there has been something called “anarchism,” anarchists have been struggling to define it—and, as often as not, they have been in struggle against other self-identified anarchists. At this point in our history, this seems both hard to deny and pointless to regret. These are not battles that can be won “once and for all,” since the struggle over meaning is just essentially the process by which meaning is made. That means that there is an element of futility to this sort of debate, but not the sort that would ever let us withdraw from the fight.
oh my.. cancerous distractions keeping us from us
It’s extremely easy for these debates to simply become focused on words, or even just parts of words, whether it is a matter of the etymological quibbling so familiar in online debate or the rhetorical wars of position that tend to follow every more significant engagement in the struggle. In order to really come to grips with either the concepts behind the words or with our antagonists in debate requires some combination of clarity in our expression and consciousness of the vagaries of various contexts. So, in our case, effectiveness seems to call for being clear about our own conceptions of “anarchy” and “democracy,” but also being sensitive to the way these terms are being used elsewhere in the broad conversation about the defining characteristics of anarchism.
oh my.. lanier beyond words law et al..
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature ie: tech as it could be
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For some of us, this is not the hill we’ll pick to die on, while for others of us something vital to the anarchist project is at stake.
any project ness.. any form of m\a\p.. not hill to die on.. oi.. not even place to just hang.. cancerous distraction
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proudhon: Man can only emancipate himself from the yoke of his own nature—that is, he can only subordinate the instincts and movements of his own body to the direction of his mind, which becomes more and more developed, by education and instruction, both of which are eminently exclusively social matter; for apart from society man would have remained always a wild beast or a saint, both of which expressions mean nearly the same. Finally, the isolated man cannot be conscious of his liberty. To be free for a man, means other men around him. Liberty, then, is not a matter of isolation, but of reciprocity; not of exclusion, but on the contrary, of combination, since the liberty of each individual is nothing other than the reflection of his humanity or of his human right in the consciousness of all free men, of his brother, his compeers.
oi
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Reply to Alexander Reid Ross -william gillis
There is, in short, plenty of room for disagreement here, but I find citations of authors largely a distraction. It should matter not if literally every prior anarchist in history was pro-democracy if what is best meant by democracy is discovered to be irreconcilable with what is best meant by anarchism itself. If every heretofore anarchist was patriarchal or nationalistic that should not prove that anarchism is not in fundamental tension with those values.
rather.. deeper.. as in.. all history ness as cancerous distractions
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And the popular political prescriptions that were attached to the Enlightenment are a place where I feel its critics actually have some kick.
nothing will kick (be legit diff) until we get out of sea world
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As I’ve argued, the very premise of discrete organizations, groups, and communities is a denial or suppression of truth. Collectivities exist as self-perpetuating simplistic heuristics that obscure the underlying individual relationships, hiding the full extent of what is possible under the umbrella of The Group. Truth and community are in absolute conflict. Rather it is truth and empathy that sync. Love for others is a recognition of the fullness of their reality. But love is something innately between individuals, it’s too rich and real to tolerate being applied to simplistic abstractions like “community” or “nation” or other such monster. One can to some degree love the billions of other minds one is analytically aware of, but not as some simplified collective abstraction as “humanity” or whatever. Love refuses and rejects such dishonesty.
marsh label law et al.. but i’d say too.. truth ness itself is a cancerous distraction.. because of its implicit discreteness.. et al
The hunger for truth is prior to care about others because it is what drives our care about others.
yeah.. see.. oi.. i don’t think that is right and why.. steiner care to oppression law and graeber violence in care law.. et al.. oi..
Democracy’s focus on majorities, rough consensus, and “the community” is a blunderbuss of violent simplification that deprives individuals of agency and everyone of the full extent of cooperation possible.
maté trump law.. brown belonging law.. et al
So when Alexander talks about “principles” as socially arising traditions the same questions apply. Never mind the injustice such a picture does to the philosophy of ethics, brutally reducing values to mere social traditions rather than objective conceptual attractors that any unsocialized mind like an AI could in theory find. How are these principles or truths socially reached?
Is it a consensus arrived at through market means — that is to say emergent from decentralized and stigmergic roots — or is it a “consensus” arrived at through democratic means — that is to an arbitrary majoritarianism of some kind of arbitrary collective body? I impose my own definitions here, provocatively juxtaposing markets as liberating and democracy as oppressive (contra Nathan Goodman’s reconciliation of the two), because I don’t know of other framing that lays bare the same tension between emergence truly from the roots — from individual to individual relations — versus “emergence” in a manner that sloppily stomps over those individuals — by say collective conversation instead.
Yeah, that’s right, I’m literally arguing that conversations that aren’t one-on-one are oppressive to some degree. Or, at least in greater risk of constraining the agency of all involved, given the information theoretical constraints of conversation. Expect me to release a line of shirts printed with “Anarchism Is Introversion And Nothing Less” soon.
even those.. even self talk.. we all need detox first.. otherwise our whalespeak is just perpetuating myth of tragedy and lord et al
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It’s not “useless” to speak radically, to attempt to root our words to some kind of concrete definition. Rather such conceptual radicalism is the most useful approach we have.
oh my.. graeber model law et al
If anarchism is to not blur out and mean anything and everything it must ultimately mean something in specific. We may not be able to fully reach such an ideal or even fully grasp its consequences, and we can be generous in our recognition of those in orbit of it, if convinced they’re orbiting a slightly different point, but that doesn’t mean we can’t speak of degrees of proximity or point out that someone’s motion is taking them around a different concept altogether.
Democracy represents a different concept altogether from anarchy and we should be clear about that.
Response to Shawn Wilbur and Gabriel Amadej – wayne price
Shawn Wilbur argues that “anarchy” and “democracy” are completely distinct principles—philosophically. Philosophically, there is “no middle ground.” However, in actual living, there is “the likelihood that we might continue to have recourse to practices that we think of as ‘democratic.’ It is difficult to imagine a society in which we are not at times forced to…engage in practices like voting.” How often will these times happen? Perhaps a lot during the “transition” from statism to anarchy.
only because we all need detox.. (that we can’t imagine)..
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
Shawn seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. He fiercely rejects even the most decentralized, direct, participatory, democracy in the name of anarchism (philosophically). This is combined with a willingness to support actual democratic procedures in solving collective problems (practically).
Let us leave aside philosophical definitions, as well as considerations of what Proudhon and Bakunin really meant (although Bakunin’s anarchist association called itself the Alliance of Socialist Democracy). Does Shawn really disagree with me and other democratic anarchists, in praxis (integrating theory and practice)? He and I are both for as much freedom as possible, both individual and collective—rejecting the state and any other institution of oppression. We both want collective decisions to be as free and uncoerced as is possible. We both accept that there have to be some conflicts in which everyone is not satisfied with the outcome, conflicts which must be managed through democratic procedures of some sort (even if he compares this to cannibalism!). If we can agree on this much, then I am willing to accept that we have differences in philosophy.
public consensus always oppresses someone(s)
and so unnecessary to do ‘as free as’ ness with the means we have today.. for all to be legit free..
Gabriel Amadej also bases her argument on principles developed by Proudhon. Unlike Shawn Wilbur, her solution to collective decisionmaking is not through democratic procedures but through “the market.” But our societies are so intertwined and interconnected, economically and otherwise, that even decentralization will not end the need for working and living together collectively—and making collective decisions in our workplaces and communities—democracy.
oi
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Anarchism Without Anarchy – shawn wilbur
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Price’s initial contribution to the exchange, “Democracy, Anarchism, & Freedom,” champions democracy as the “rule of the commoners” and defines anarchism as “democracy without the state.” So we are left with an anarchism defined as “stateless rule.” He correctly observes that some of us object to the notion of any form of “rule,” tout court—and I will be happy to count myself among those who reject even the sort of “no rulers, but not no rules” formula that we sometimes encounter in anarchist circles. But perhaps the most striking bit of the essay is Price’s claim that “the aim of anarchism is not to end absolutely all coercion, but to reduce coercion to the barest minimum possible.”
that’s our biggest problem.. none of us to date has tried something that’s not part\ial ness
for (blank)’s sake
I suppose that this is an attempt on his part to avoid defining anarchism in terms of impossible, utopian goals. He follows this claim with the observation that “there will never be a perfect society.” But it isn’t clear how the question of a “perfect” society really relates to anarchist aspirations. Presumably, in context, this is a claim about the possibility of ending all coercion, but, if the goal of anarchism is “to reduce coercion to the barest minimum possible,” how would we distinguish, in principle, between the overwhelming majority of coercions, which it is indeed within the aims of anarchism to eliminate, and that “barest minimum” of presumably “democratic” coercions which it is not the aim of anarchism to eliminate? The difference between a barest minimum and zero seems to be negligible, and it isn’t clear why that tiny remainder is not simply attributable to the fact that the world doesn’t always cooperate with even the best of our principles.
It would seem to me that there really is no way to make aiming for the “barest minimum” a consistent principle, and that imagining we would only have an aim—or ideal, a word that Price is happy to use in the context of democracy—that was always achievable in all regards seems at least a matter of setting our sights a bit low.
anything that is not sans any form of m\a\p.. is too low
No—honestly—it seems like setting those sights inexplicably, impossibly low. I quite simply find the conception of anarchism as a form of rule impossible to wrap my head around. It seems to me that the (presumably practical) argument here has to be that a non-governmental society is impossible—that anarchy is impossible. But because the rationale for aiming short of anarchy—explicitly as an ideal—seems so uncertain to me, I can only wonder if the other half of the largely unstated argument is that anarchy is also undesirable.
It seems to be fairly consistently the case that the defense of democracy is tied to claims like the one Price makes that “[a]narchists are not against all social coordination, community decision-making, and protection of the people.” It’s not a particularly bold claim, in part because it’s fairly vague. You could probably find staunch anarchist individualists who could find a sense in which they fully agree. But it seems likely that the interpretations of the phrase the individualist would find friendly to their beliefs might seem dangerously un-coordinated, anti-social—anarchic, in the negative sense of the term—to the defender of democracy.
There has always been a faction among the anarchists who wrestled with the terminology of anarchy, whether because it seems to indicate dangerous and undesirable things or because it seems to indicate too many things all at once. And there has probably also always been another that is just a little too comfortable with the simultaneously edgy and protean quality of that terminology. If I had to characterize what seem to me the most powerful sorts of anarchist praxis (not a term I’m fond of, but maybe one that is useful in this context), it seems to me that they have remained actively engaged in all that is really anarchic about anarchism. But I suspect that a construction like “anarchist democracy” comes from a different place entirely.
graeber fear of play law et al
graeber unpredictability/surprise law and carhart-harris entropy law.. et al
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From my perspective, I am not the one who “seems to want to have his cake and eat it too.” I have ideals and expectations, and a clear enough sense of the difficulties facing the anarchist project that I am not expecting the sudden and complete realization of my principles. As a result, I’ve quite explicitly said that the anarchist project will “necessarily confront [us] with failure on a pretty regular basis, particularly in the long and difficult transition from a fundamentally authoritarian, governmentalist society to one that begins to resemble, in practical terms, our political ideals.” That seems more like commitment to the project, even if the cake is a lie, in part because the proposed alternative, “modifying our ideals and retaining some ‘pure’ form of democracy”—and retaining it precisely as a goal and as if it was not in contradiction with anarchist principles—seems “truly untenable.”
part of the problem.. we don’t understand how takes a lot of work ness is blinding us from the expo potential to leap we have today..
I just can’t find it in me to consider a system in which we take turns (hopefully) coercing one another as a means of “social coordination, community decision-making, and protection of the people” as the goal of anarchism. Of course, I know the anarchist literature well enough that I could easily pull some quotes to suggest that identification, or something even more authoritarian. Consider this, from Bakunin: “I receive and I give—such is human life. Each is a directing authority and each is directed in his turn.” Anarchy is ubiquitous authority—or anarchy is impossible. Or, perhaps, “considerations of what Proudhon and Bakunin really meant,” when addressed with care and consistency, are not easily separable from our discussions.
but you are by holding on to red flags and any form of m\a\p
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Therefore, those who really want ‘government of the people’ in the sense that each can assert his or her own will, ideas and needs, must ensure that no-one, majority or minority, can rule over others; in other words, they must abolish government, meaning any coercive organisation, and replace it with the free organisation of those with common interests and aims.
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
This would be very simple if every group and individual could live in isolation and on their own, in their own way, supporting themselves independently of the rest, supplying their own material and moral needs.
actually no.. it wouldn’t even work.. but would be easy if we let go enough .. when legit free.. crave others.. et al.. ie: year 4 – (not enough) people can dance for the dance to dance..
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But even free agreement will always benefit most those who are intellectually and technically prepared. We therefore recommend to our friends and those who truly wish the good of all, to study the most urgent problems, those that will require a practical solution the very day that the people shake off the yoke that oppresses them.
oh my.. free agreement .. isn’t free people.. if have/need prep/training et al.. huge red flags we’re doing it/life wrong..
Non-Coercive Collective Decision Making: A Quaker Perspective – robert kirchner
Rather, I challenge the assumption that non-coercive collective decision-making is unfeasible. I belong to a religious group, the Quakers (a.k.a. the Religious Society of Friends), that have been grappling with this issue over the past 350 years. We have developed a non-coercive collective decision-making process that works for us. It does not always work smoothly, and sometimes it operates rather messily, painfully, and slowly. However, as I will explain, it does work, and often quite miraculously. In this article I present my personal understanding and experience of the Quaker “business” process, as we call it. My broader goal is to defend a vision of anarchism that allows for vigorous community and powerful collective action, without squelching the autonomy of individuals.
oi..
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lists quakers 5 spiritual insights.. 2 are
- Integrity: We strive to speak and act in accordance with Truth, as fully as we are able to perceive it, under all circumstances
- Community: Our ‘leadings’ and personal experience of the Light must be tested and lived out in relationships with others.
others.. but at least red flags w integ and commun.. oi.. deep dive into ref flag ness w 1fp.. oi
at the least.. red flags with these.. oi.. deep dive into red flagness here for ie:
With this background, we are now in a position to examine Quaker business process. Once a month (typically), each local congregation (styled as a ‘monthly meeting’) meets ‘for worship with attention to business,’ generally after the rise of our regular worship meeting, facilitated by a clerk. Anyone who is part of the meeting may attend and participate. Decisions are made without voting. Rather, the participants may each speak to the matter at hand (preferably only once), and listen to one another for a sense of spiritual unity on the issue. We try to maintain an attitude of worship, the silently prayerful ‘gathered stillness,’ throughout the process. Once everyone has had an opportunity to speak, the clerk attempts to draft a ‘minute’ that expresses the ‘sense of the meeting’ on the issue. They then ask if the minute is acceptable to the meeting. If there are no objections or proposed changes, the minute is recorded. Otherwise, the discernment process may continue until unity is reached, if time permits, or be held over for ‘seasoning’ and taken up again at a subsequent business meeting.
just oi..
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oh my to all.. but just copying 1p.. ugh:
The process is not easy nor is it always comfortable. Spiritual discipline and great patience are required for the process to operate well. There exists within each of us, I believe, a ‘shallow self,’ a complex of unexamined wants and belief systems, often fraught with defense mechanisms, often heavily shaped by the conventional wisdom of the surrounding culture. This shallow self must be kept out of the driver’s seat during business meeting. We must avoid reacting superficially to the words coming out of others’ mouths and listen with empathy to the intentions underneath the words and to the deep response of love and truth within our own hearts. That is how we discern what the Spirit is leading us to do. Effective participation (actively and passively) in the Quaker discernment process is a skill that grows with practice. And it cannot be reduced to a set of rules; it depends upon the good-will and openness to the Spirit of the participants.
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I have heard some Quakers assert that this business process can only be used successfully in the context of Quaker meetings and that it cannot be used by groups with other sorts of beliefs or with a secular agenda. I clearly disagree, or I wouldn’t be touting the process in this article addressed to non-Quaker anarchists. There already exists within Quaker meetings a wide range of beliefs about God, including non-belief. So it’s hard to see how any uniquely Quaker beliefs or traits are necessary to the operation of the process. Many non-Quakers – particularly, I should hope, many anarchists – would also affirm the equality of all people, as a sacred (i.e. deeply valued) principle. Quakers aren’t the only folks who have a commitment to some sort of Higher Power, something larger or deeper than themselves, whether they speak of this in terms of religious metaphors or other sorts of metaphors. Quakers aren’t the only folks capable of deep patience, compassionate listening, and openness of heart. On the other hand, these spiritually-grounded attitudes, values and behaviors – patience, compassion, openness, etc. – are not optional. Without them, the process degenerates into acrimonious debate, or other dysfunctions. Cultivating these attitudes, values and behaviors is certainly part of the Quaker ethos; but Quakers have no monopoly on them.
makes no diff if still intox’d in sea world.. oi
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It is incumbent on individual members who see what is going on within such a group to speak up and challenge this shadow behavior. This truth-telling requires courage, for such individuals may encounter rejection and other retribution from the larger group. However, without such individual courage, the group will slide into more and more serious dysfunction. As I see it, this responsibility is an unavoidable part of being human.
oh my
A Last Response to Shawn Wilbur – wayne price
shawn is @corvuseditions on twitter.. seems to mostly be talking about his proudhon translating
Antinomies of Democracy – shawn wilbur
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To the extent that the health and success of the collectivity depends on lively forms of conflict among the members (and Proudhon made complexity and intensity of internal relations one of the markers of the health—and the freedom—of these entities), then the more conscious all members must be of the need to maintain balance without resorting to some winner-take-all scenario.
oi.. we have no idea what legit free people are like..
Instead, the principle of voluntary association and careful attention to real relations of interdependence ought to be our guides. And the rich sort of self-interest we’ve been exploring here ought to serve us well in that regard. To abandon the assumptions of governmentalism and take on the task of self-government is going to be extremely demanding in some cases, so we might expect that individuals will desire to keep their relations simple where they can, coming together to form explicit associations only when circumstances demand it—and then dissolving those association when circumstances allow.
oi.. rather.. need: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
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Where existing relations seem inadequate to meet our needs and desires, then some new form of association is always an option—and with practice hopefully we will learn to take on the complex responsibilities involved. Where existing relations seem to bind us in ways that stand in the way of our needs and desires, we’ll learn to distinguish between those existing associations which simply do not serve and those of a more fundamental, inescapable sort—and hopefully we will grow into those large-scale responsibilities from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Conventions for the use of property, the distribution of revenue and products, the mechanics of exchange, etc. can probably be approached in much the same way we would approach the formation of a new workgroup, the extension of a roadway, the establishment of sustainable waste or stormwater disposal, etc.
oh my
- Organization, according to the federative principle, is a process by which we identify—or extricate—specific social “selves,” on the one hand, or establish their involvement in larger-scale collectivities, on the other, and establish the narrow confines within which various “democratic” practices might come into play. If we are organized in anarchistic federations, then we can expect that organization to be not just bottom-up, but very specifically up from the problems, up from the local needs and desires, up from the material constraints, with the larger-scale collectivities only emerging on the basis of converging interests. Beyond the comparatively temporary nature of the federated collectivities, we should probably specify that we are talking about a largely consultative federalism, within which individuals strive to avoid circumstances in which decision among options is likely to become a clear loss for any of the interested parties. If we are forced by circumstances to resort to mechanisms like a majority vote, then we will want to contain the damage as much as possible. But I suspect we will often find that the local decisions that are both sufficiently collective and divisive to require something worth calling “democratic practices,” but also sufficiently serious to push us to confrontations within local groups may find solutions through consultation with other, similar groups. Alternately, if the urgency is not simply local—if, for example, ecological concerns are a factor—they may find themselves “solved,” not by local desires at all, but by consideration of the effects elsewhere.
oh my to all.. but to this.. just means we’re doing it/life wrong
Taking these various observations together, it should be clear that I do indeed believe that sometimes we will be required to fall back on familiar sorts of democratic practices, but I hope it is also clear why, in very practical terms, I believe that this will constitute a failure within an anarchist society.
failure of trying something legit diff.. to get to legit free people.. yeah that.
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- anarch\ism
- accidental anarchist
- anarchism and markets
- anarchism and other essays
- anarchism or rev movement
- anarchist communism
- anarchist library
- anarchists against democracy
- anarchy after leftism
- anarchy and democracy
- anarchy in manner of speaking
- anarchy works
- art of not being governed
- at the café
- billionaire and anarchists
- david on anarchism ness
- enlightened anarchy
- fragments of an anarchist anthropology
- freedom and anarchy
- graeber anarchism law
- inventing anarchy
- is anarchism impossible
- kevin on anarchism w/o adj
- nika on anarchism
- on anarchism
- post scarcity anarchism
- two cheers for anarchism
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be you. 