I hear this claim a fair bit, admittedly often in communist spaces.
It is said that any group of people bigger than 50-200 people “requires” hierarchy.
I’m not sure about that.
What do anarchists make of this?
I hear this claim a fair bit, admittedly often in communist spaces.
It is said that any group of people bigger than 50-200 people “requires” hierarchy.
I’m not sure about that.
What do anarchists make of this?
Doesn’t the government structure work on majority rule?
Anarchic societies exist/have existed? In recent times I mean, not back when we were hunter-gatherers or something.
There are many ways you can structure governance. It’s just how you decide to do stuff collectively. In certain contexts (such as in crisis) you might choose to follow orders from one person, for example the lead firefighter. Generally for decisions which are not time-critical simple majority is pretty poor and often leads to polarised and ineffective decisions.
Anarchists tend to favour consensus, with voting as a backup if consensus fails
All societies have some anarchism in them, they can’t function without it. Think community programs like buy nothing, classes, repair sheds, disaster relief efforts etc. Some societies have been more anarchic than others, David Graeber and David Wengrow cover some of how authority and power have been handled in their book The Dawn of Everything, mostly in the Americas where large and less heirarchical nations existed before colonisation (and some super hierarchical ones too). It would be a good jumping off point for finding more research via the citations.
How do you even reach decisions with (I’m assuming complete) consensus? I would expect that someone or the other is always opposed to practically anything that is being attempted to be passed.
Given that, in many places where homophobia is the norm, most people would push for anti-gay laws, wouldn’t that keep gay rights at an impasse, at best?
So we’re going to have to split this into a few parts, and to be clear I am not proposing that anarchism immediately leads to utopia.
anti-gay laws. Ok so what is a law? In our societies a law usually ultimately means that a piece of paper has some words on it, and if your actions are contrary to these words then men armed with guns and torture implements will hunt you down and hurt you until your actions comply with the words on the paper.
This is entirely incompatible with anarchism. Fundamental to anarchism is that coercive force will only be used when there is a pressing and immediate need to do so. If someone can hurt you for not complying with their rules you don’t have anarchism.
Ok though, you live somewhere were for some reason people are mean to you, don’t invite you to events, and otherwise bully you because you are gay. You have choices, you can stay and try to change their minds or you can leave. Leaving is easier, as you have no rents or mortgages, no passports, nothing that can be withheld from you to force you to stay in pain. Is this ideal? No, but I challenge you to come up with a system of living that will be ideal in all circumstances. At least under an anarchic system of organisation leaving is always a choice.
On someone always disagreeing: why do you think this will be the case? Is this your experience when you make decisions with more than one person? When you go out to eat is someone always adamant the choice is wrong? When you assign roles in a project is someone always unhappily complying only under threat of violence? It is not my experience that consensus is difficult to achieve except on the thorniest of issues. Under our current systems consensus is almost never achieved, any increase would be a meaningful improvement.
It’s not merely about social exclusion or bullying, but actively being hate crimed. Gay men are frequently targeted in violent attacks, lynching, often killed in sadly a significant portion of the world (Africa, the Middle East, South Asia). That is what I’m concerned about.
I’m not sure if simply leaving would be a realistic solution given that the nearest safe place could easily be several countries away, and international transport is very expensive
On disagreements: If you look at political discourse and voting in parliamentary discussions, there is always disagreement. It is rarely the case that everyone agrees 100-0 (numbers arbitrary) in favour of any decision. Leftists are infamous for their constant disagreements and splintering into different factions
There is no magic bullet that can make everyone get on. All anarchism can offer is that no organ of coercive violence can be used against people.
If an individual or conspiracy desires to hurt someone they can act and try to do that. Nothing can ever prevent that, all you can do is try and stop it happening. No king or emperor can stop a lynching, only punish people after. Historically however these acts have often occured because of support by those weilding power.
Murder is illegal and yet it happens, to prevent it you have to remove incentives and shift culture.
disagreements: It seems we both agree that current parliamentry systems are highly disfunctional and don’t encourage or train people in consensus building to everyone’s detriment.