myths about anarchism, democracy, & decision-making

Myths About Anarchism, Democracy, and Decision-Making (2025) by zoe baker

via 40 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zoe-baker-myths-about-anarchism-democracy-and-decision-making]

notes/quotes:

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“I have often read writings that attempt to discredit my ideas, but which merely repeat, using different terminology, what I myself have argued and argue. Likewise, I have often seen ideas being attributed to comrades who scorn them, for the easy pleasure of refuting them afterwards” – Errico Malatesta 1911 (Malatesta 2023, 316).

errico on anarchism.. malatesta impossibility law.. malatesta conditions law

In 2022 I wrote an essay called Anarchism and Democracy which summarised what members of the historical anarchist movement thought about democracy and how they made collective decisions (Baker 2022). This essay was subsequently completely misunderstood by both pro-democracy and anti-democracy anarchists as saying things it does not say and which I have never said. Over the subsequent years these distortions and misinterpretations have taken on a life of their own and altered how people read and remember my essay. In parallel to these developments both old and new myths about historical anarchist views on democracy and collective decision-making have continued to spread. In this essay I shall go through these myths one by one and debunk them. Through doing so I shall expand on topics that my previous essay only briefly touched on.

Myth One: historical anarchists only rejected representative democracy.

This is extremely wrong. *Anarchism is against all forms of democratic government and authority. Historical anarchists typically described really existing governments as institutions that (i) perform the function of reproducing the power of the economic ruling classes; (ii) are hierarchically and centrally organised; and (iii) are wielded by a minority political ruling class who sit at the top of the government hierarchy and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalised force, such as the police, prisons, army, and legal system (Baker 2023, 74-78). **It is nonetheless logically possible for a government to be ruled by the majority of the population. If such a genuinely democratic government existed then anarchists would oppose it. In 1890 Charlotte Wilson published an article called “Democracy or Anarchism” in which she ***rejected “Democracy” in the sense of “the rule or government of the many” (Wilson 2000, 66). Decades later in 1927 Malatesta wrote that, “anarchists do not accept majority government (democracy)” (Malatesta 2014, 488). The exact same point was made by other major anarchist theorists, including Carlo Cafiero (Cafiero 2012, 50), Emma Goldman (Goldman 1996, 110), Voltairine De Cleyre (de Cleyre 2005, 57-58, 92-93), and Ricardo Mella (Mella 2015).

*if only.. that would mean sans any form of m\a\p.. which no one has yet tried/seen to date

**voluntary compliance via consensus ness.. maté trump law.. et al

***any form of democratic admin as cancerous distraction

This perspective was grounded in the anarchist opposition to any hierarchical social structure in which a ruler wields authority and so the institutionalised power to dominate others. They were against both the rule of the minority and the rule of the majority (A. Parsons 2003, 94; L. Parsons 2004, 96; Galleani 2012, 42; Grave 1899, chapter VII; Wilson 2000, 54-55). To quote Malatesta,

*aka: any form of m\a\p

Authoritarian organization, which is to say the type in which some command and others obey, derives from the arrogance of those who finds themselves, in some way, in a more advantageous situation than others, as well as from the submissiveness and apathy of the masses, who, unwilling and unable to manage for themselves, let themselves be dominated by someone who sets them to work in his place, with the pretext, or perhaps the sincere intention, of doing good for them. In an authoritarian organization the rulers are always, in practice, a very small number of individuals; but even if they accounted for the numerical majority of the organized, their domination would not be any less unfair and fecund with corruption and woes of every kind for the rulers and the ruled alike (Malatesta 2019, 130).

all the forms of people telling other people what to do

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The anarchist rejection of democracy as a system of government applied to both direct democracies and representative democracies. This is for the obvious reason that all democratic governments, whether direct or representative, are governments and so incompatible with anarchism’s goal of a stateless classless society without authority. Despite this fact, it is extremely rare to find any historical anarchists discussing direct democracy explicitly. Most anarchist critiques of democracy either make claims about the idea of majority government/majority rule in general or focus specifically on representative democracy (Bakunin 1990, 13; Berkman 2003, 71-73, 103; Kropotkin 2022, 101-27).

*This is a reflection of the context that anarchists were writing in. For most of European history there was no distinction between direct and representative democracy. The ancient Greek word dēmokratía literally meant the power or rule (kratos) of the people (dēmos). It referred to a specific constitution that a kind of government called a polis could have (Carey 2017, 1-3). The word polis simultaneously referred to (i) an urban centre in the sense of a settlement with more than 1,000 inhabitants in which administrative and judicial functions are based; (.. A polis was a democracy if it was ruled by all of its male citizens or at least the majority of its male citizens. The consequence of this is that poleis with fundamentally different systems of political decision-making could all be regarded as democracies if they were based on the rule of the dēmos (Raekstad 2020). Orators of the period typically added to this basic definition various political ideals, such as the notion that the polis was governed by laws that applied equally to all citizens, rather than the whims of a tyrant (Carey 2010, 25, 167-68). For the philosopher Aristotle, democracy necessarily involved the rule of a majority of citizens who were also poor in the sense of not owning substantial amounts of property (Aristotle 1995, 100-2, 139-41). The most famous example of ancient Greek democracy is 5th century BC Athens. All major political decisions were made by a simple majority vote of adult male citizens in a formal assembly called the ecclesia. These decisions were referred to as laws or decrees. Key polis officials were selected at random by lot. The actual majority of the population – women, slaves, children and foreigners – were excluded and lacked decision-making power in the assembly (Hansen 1991, 304-20).

*there still is no distinction.. all same song as long as any form of m\a\p

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(Bakunin 1964, 218). He was not convinced that the implementation of referendums at a national level would fundamentally change this situation. He explained at length,

mikhail bakunin

We can well see then that in the representative system, even when improved upon with the aid of the referendum, popular control does not exist, and since no serious liberty is possible for the people without this control, we are driven to the conclusion that popular liberty and self-government are falsehoods (ibid, 219-220).

the Radical-Democrats of the Zurich canton devised and put into practice a new political system—the referendum, or direct legislation by the people. But the referendum itself is only a palliative, a new illusion, a falsehood. In order to vote, with full knowledge of the issue in question and with the full freedom required for it, upon laws proposed to the people or which the people themselves are induced to propose, it is necessary that the people have the time and the education needed to study those proposals, to reflect upon them, to discuss them. The people must become a vast Parliament holding its sessions in the open fields.

need no prep.. no train .. ness

But this is rarely possible, and only upon grand occasions when the proposed laws arouse the attention and affect the interests of everyone. Most of the time the proposed laws are of such a specialized nature that one has to accustom oneself to political and juridical abstractions to grasp their real implications. Naturally they escape the attention and comprehension of the people, who vote for them blindly, believing implicitly their favorite orators. Taken separately, every one of those laws appears too insignificant to be of much interest to the masses, but in their totality they form a net which enmeshes them. Thus, in spite of the referendum, the so-called sovereign people remain the instrument and the very humble servant of the bourgeoisie.

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The result is that people would be subject to the arbitrary power of an abstraction called ‘the general interest’, which in practice meant that “every liberty is stifled, and each person’s interests are sacrificed to the interests—political or otherwise—of those who are in power” (ibid, 101).

people telling other people what to do

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A similar critique was made by Malatesta, who described the Commune as “a government like all the rest” which produced “a great deal of declarations of principles, very advanced but never implemented” (Malatesta 2019, 242-43).

There are two likely reasons why historical anarchist critiques of direct democracies in ancient Greece are so rare. Firstly, most anarchist theory was published in short articles and pamphlets that were read by workers. The general goal of this theory was to persuade workers to become anarchists and revolt against the ruling classes. Anarchist authors choose to explain why currently existing social structures should be abolished, rather than critiquing a system of government that was from thousands of years ago and no longer existed. This is no different to the fact that anarchists wrote numerous critiques of capitalist wage labour, but did not feel the need to write articles attacking the ancient Greek version of slavery. Secondly, anarchism as a social movement developed out of, among other things, radical republicanism, which aimed to abolish monarchies and replace them with democratic republics (Ravindranathan 1988; Pernicone 1993, 35-44). In parallel to these events anarchism also emerged in opposition to the first social democratic political parties, which advocated the creation of a workers’ or people’s state and the establishment of democracy across the different spheres of society, especially government and the economy (Liebknecht 1899, 3-8, 24, 49-52). This language was a continuation of an old socialist phrase from the 1840s: the universal democratic and social republic (MECW 7, 586; Lehning 1970, 172, 242). As a result, the development of anarchist theory was intertwined with the rejection of certain democratic ideas, including the goal of bourgeois representative democracy, a workers’ republic and so on.

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Although anarchist authors focused on critiquing representative democracies, many of their objections also applied to direct democracies. One of the reasons why Malatesta rejected democracy was because really existing democratic governments are coercive organs through which a minority rules over and dominates the majority. He wrote in 1924 that, “it is easy to understand what has already been proved by universal historical experience: even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force” (Malatesta 1995, 78). As a result “democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class” (ibid, 77). What historical experiences Malatesta probably had in mind can be gleamed from articles he wrote decades earlier. In 1884 he noted that,

There is a republic in America, and, for all her expanses of free land, for all her super-abundant production, there are people starving to death. They have a republic, but despite the freedom and equality written into the constitution, the poor man has no human dignity, and the cavalry uses its clubs or sabres to disperse workers clamoring for bread and jobs. They have their republic, but the native peoples are reduced to desperate straits and hunted down like wild animals… What am I saying? In America, as in Rome and in Greece before her, we have seen that the republic is compatible with slavery! (Malatesta 2014, 18)

This line of thinking was continued in another article that was published a few months later. Malatesta explained that, “in Greece, for instance, in order to deliver the greatest well-being to the people, they sought the best government, or ‘the government of the most.’

has to be all for the dance to dance.. and not all if any form of democratic admin.. if any form of m\a\p

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These points underpinned his belief that the polis is superior to modern nation states. He (rudolf rocker) argued that,

Since the area of the Greek municipality extended to only a few square miles every citizen was easily able to keep track of the entire public life and to form his own judgment about everything—a circumstance of great importance, which is utterly inconceivable in our modern state organization with the wide ramifications of its governmental machinery and the complicated gearing of its bureaucratic institutions. Hence the perplexed helplessness of the citizen of the modern state, his exaggerated overvaluation of governmental proclamations and of political leadership, which deprive him of all personal initiative. Since he is, of course, not in a position to keep track of all the fields of activity of the modern state and its internal and external policy, and is, on the other hand, so firmly convinced of the unalterable fixedness of all these functions that he believes he would sink into a bottomless quicksand if the political equilibrium were at all disturbed, his feeling of his own personal unimportance and dependence upon the state becomes strengthened, and his belief in the absolute necessity of political authority—which today is deeper seated in man than his belief in the authority of God—becomes deeper still. So, at best, he dreams only of a change of the persons at the head of the state and does not comprehend that all the inadequacies and evils of the political machine which constantly oppress him depend on the very existence of the state itself and hence always recur in any of the various forms it may assume.

this happens if any form of m\a\p

Not so with the Greek. Since he could more easily get a view of the inner workings of the polis he was in a better position to pass judgment on the conduct of his leading men. He had their earthbound humanity always before his eyes and was the more interested in his own affairs because his intellectual agility was not crippled by blind faith in authority.

actually all of us are blind.. if any form of m\a\p.. just diff degrees..

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This high praise went alongside the acknowledgment of important negatives features of democratic Athens like slavery, the persecution of certain independent thinkers like Socrates, the corrupting effects of power, and imperialism (ibid, 352, 372-373). Similar criticisms were made by Reclus in his overview of ancient Greek history (Reclus 1905, 334-38).

everyone a slave if any form of m\a\p

The anarchist rejection of authoritarian direct democracies like ancient Athens, where male citizens gathered to pass decrees and laws in a formal assembly, *should not be interpreted as a rejection of all assemblies. Anarchists were against government, authority, and domination. They were not opposed to people voluntarily meeting as equals in an assembly in order to engage in a collective process of deliberation and decision-making. They in fact advocated this as a form of anarchist organisation. The Spanish anarchist José Llunas Pujols wrote in 1882 that an anarchist association “meets in a general assembly once a week or more often, at which everything pertinent to its operations is decided” (Pujols 2005, 126). Another Spanish anarchist called José Monroy recalled that in the early 1900s at meetings of the local trade union section “we would submit ideas to the assembly, and the bad ideas would be thrown out” (Quoted in Mintz 2004, 27). Decades later the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), which was a Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union, proposed in its 1936 Zaragoza congress resolutions that **collective decisions in an anarchist society would be made in “general assemblies”, “communal assemblies” and “popular assemblies” (Quoted in Peirats 2011, 103, 105, 107).

*ie of voluntary compliance.. because still forms of m\a\p

**how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

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For Bakunin, “the aim of democratic and social revolution” included the abolition of capitalism and “the *complete emancipation of individuals and associations from the yoke of divine and human authority, the absolute destruction of all compulsory unions and amalgamations of communes into provinces, provinces and conquered lands into the State, and lastly the radical dissolution of the centralist, custodial, authoritarian State, with all its military, bureaucratic, administrative, judicial and civil institutions. In other words, the restoration of liberty to all—individuals, collective bodies, associations, communes, provinces, regions and nations alike—and mutual safeguard of that liberty through federation” (ibid, 86. Also see ibid, 65-67, 78-83). Bakunin was nonetheless not yet an anarchist and so still advocated a system of decentralised “government” in which autonomous communes **voluntarily federated to form provincial, national, and international parliaments that had accompanying legal and tax systems (ibid, 69-76).

*nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem.. because nothing to date has been about legit freedom .. which will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

**voluntary ness is always about voluntary compliance

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He first publicly called himself an “anarchist” in September 1867 in “The Slavic Question,” which was printed in the Italian paper Libertà e Giustizia (Freedom and Justice). He wrote in response to Pan-Slavists that “they are unitarians at all costs, always preferring public order to freedom and I am an anarchist and prefer freedom to public order

then have to let go of any form of m\a\p..

carhart-harris entropy law et al

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