An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

A list of things that are wrong is pretty boring without plausible alternatives. Like, even if you're right, it doesn't matter because we're not comparing The Bad Thing to The Absence Of All Those Bad Things. That's trivial, of course bad things are bad.

We're comparing The Bad Thing to A Different Set of Tradeoffs. That's the part I want to see.

> Anarchists believe in unmediated relations between free individuals, the absence of any coercive or alienating forces in societies, and an unquestionable, universal right to self-determination.

If that sounds difficult to implement, I agree! I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life. At the scale of society I see Marxism as just as important. How to square the two? I don't know

How to make a political program out of anarchism? I don't know, but I think it'll be possible with the right philosophical and scientific mindset. I think it would be a mindset quite radically different from how we currently approach the world.

There are some immediate problems to ponder. For example, my fist is an unmediated relation between individuals. Does the idea of free individual preclude it? You can't base your politics only on what you think ought to be, but also how it ought to change when there is a violation of that preferred condition. Clearly there are times when a good anarchist (whatever that is) will throw a punch, and how ought an anarchist society deal with that?

I like The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin as a thoughtful examination of society that tries to grapple with such small and dirty questions. As well as bigger questions of course.

In that quote, I don't see a solution, or a goal, but an orientation. It frames the world in a way that asks you to focus on certain possibilities that might seem remote, but have existed and will exist so long as humanity exists. That's why I'm an anarchist and why I like and agree with this piece.

With all due respect, if this is the best the anarchists have (and this article is from a respected individual and is decently written), you're fucked. These critiques are not new or without response. The problem is, this is 1000+ words of arguments about human nature, special pleading, etc, with NO sources. They describe known phenomena like control of the agenda and never call it that, I'm not sure if that's because they aren't aware of that term or they just fon't feel like attributing hundreds if not thousands of years of research before them. It'd be like if someone cloned Signal and acted like Moxie didn't exist.

Cite something, anything that scholars who study politics and democracies have written, don't put forward these vague critiques with nothing backing it up. Many arguments that seem intuitive are wrong when faced with evidence, and this article and anarchists in general seem to forget that democracies have certain features (and misfeatures) that are responses to real world situations.

Anarchism is a political ideology that's never met the real world, like a lot of ideologies on HN and elsewhere. This might convince the random Internet reader, but it's not going to convince anyone who has studied the topic.

Here's a few politics 101 cites that are decent:

https://www.amazon.com/Models-Democracy-3rd-David-Held/dp/08...

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Its-Critics-Robert-Dahl/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Second-Robert-Dahl/dp/03001...

https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re...

Could tech people stick to what they are good at, or at least acknowledge the wider world of experience when they are making arguments?

I very much enjoyed (and even laughed) reading your response.

It’s very concerning to see people talk so positively about anarchy. Another word for anarchy is “nihilism”, which is its philosophical twin.

Neither of these words are used a lot today, but “nihilism” you’ll see mentioned a lot in the build-up to WWII.

Am currently reading the below book, which argues in its final chapter that a German invasion of Poland is imminent and is the next course of action Hitler will take. It was published in May 1939 in German, and translated in August 1939 to English. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939.

The author is very clear that for all their flaws, capitalism and democracy are very reformable. And that a dictatorship of Fascism or Communism will dazzle with early successes before descending into violence both internally and externally.

The Revolution Of Nihilism: Warning To The West https://www.amazon.com/dp/1258001071/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_RZCn...

That's true of Libertarianism as well.