An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005) • Hacker News Board

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#61

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 4:58 AM UTC

JetSpiegel wrote: post #24

kijin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect anarchists for offering thorough criticisms of the democratic status quo that too many people take for granted. I would even like to see a few thousand anarchists start their own society and try to put their theories into practice on an artificial island or something. Even if they all need to be rescued by UN forces at the end of the day, the experiment will provide the rest of humanity with valuable insigh…

I would argue anarchism has been tried in the past, it was simply called feudalism. Since it lead to the Dark Ages, there's not much support for it nowadays.

That's absurb. Anarchism is a system completely without land ownership (i.e. "property is theft"). Feudalism is a system based almost entirely around land ownership (named after the word feodum meaning a grant of land in exchange for service).

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#62

Post by kiliantics » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 5:00 AM UTC

0xBA5ED wrote: post #51

If the relations between free individuals is unmediated, they can interact in any way they choose. So if a group agrees to pool their resources and impose their collective will on others, then you just lost your anarchy. To eliminate "coercive forces", you'd need to ensure that no group or individual can acquire leverage over another.

A big part of anarchist ideology is the notion of "solidarity". So if a group were to attempt to assert authority by coercive means like this, then people would ideally come together in solidarity to stop them. This is why anarchists and antifa show up to stop neo-nazis that are threatening minorities and other vulnerable groups.

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#63

Post by MikkoFinell » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 5:01 AM UTC

danharaj wrote: post #4

> 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…

>I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life.

That's nice to hear, me and my friends feel that way too. BTW we're coming to take your stuff, enslave your family, and kill you of course. Isn't freedom from the oppressive state just great?

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#64

Post by kiliantics » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 5:15 AM UTC

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

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 becaus…

There are quite a few examples of serious academics that have endorsed anarchism and have more robust arguments against the status quo. Chomsky and Graeber are very well-regarded and have works on the topic that are properly cited the way you'd like.

That said, anarchism is all about refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy in the institutions it critiques. It's not surprising that these writers don't conform to your idea of how such a text should be organised. A dense, academic format also doesn't make for very good propaganda either.

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#65

Post by aaron-lebo » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 5:23 AM UTC

kiliantics wrote: post #64

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6

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 becaus…

There are quite a few examples of serious academics that have endorsed anarchism and have more robust arguments against the status quo. Chomsky and Graeber are very well-regarded and have works on the topic that are properly cited the way you'd like. That said, anarchism is all about refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy in the institutions it critiques. It's not surprising that these writers don't conform to your i…

Chomsky's not actually especially well-regarded in political science. I had a semester of linguistics, Chomsky was a god, we talked about his theories a lot. In political science, he's literally never been mentioned in readings.

That said, anarchism is all about refusing to acknowledge any legitimacy in the institutions it critiques. It's not surprising that these writers don't conform to your idea of how such a text should be organised.

Surely anarchists believe their arguments are better with evidence.

A dense, academic format also doesn't make for very good propaganda either.

If propaganda is averse to truth, discard the propaganda. Not asking for a page of footnotes, asking for a single citation. It's as though it was written in a vacuum, and it was not.

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#66

Post by 0xBA5ED » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 5:29 AM UTC

kiliantics wrote: post #62

0xBA5ED wrote: post #51

If the relations between free individuals is unmediated, they can interact in any way they choose. So if a group agrees to pool their resources and impose their collective will on others, then you just lost your anarchy. To eliminate "coercive forces", you'd need to ensure that no group or individual can acquire leverage over another.

A big part of anarchist ideology is the notion of "solidarity". So if a group were to attempt to assert authority by coercive means like this, then people would ideally come together in solidarity to stop them. This is why anarchists and antifa show up to stop neo-nazis that are threatening minorities and other vulnerable groups.

What you're describing is mob justice, which is essentially pure democracy.

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#67

Post by kiliantics » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 5:37 AM UTC

jmull wrote: post #48

This is awfully childish. Anywhere you have two or more people "asserting a direct and unobstructed link between thought and action, between desires and their free fulfillment" you are going to have conflict... which means not everyone is going to be able to get and do everything and anything they want. Notice that this has nothing to do with democracy. It's an inevitable consequence of the existence of people who wa…

Anarchists don't think that they will all just be able to do anything they want. They believe that the way people can reach a compromise with each other, given the constraints you mention, could be very different. They want it to happen on a horizontal and decentralised level, without the institutional hierarchies of the power structures we are forced to obey now.

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#68

Post by thescribe » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 6:14 AM UTC

wavefunction wrote: post #14

Top19 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I strongly disagree that nihilism is so tightly coupled to anarchism as you claim. There is nothing in political anarchism that suggests life is inherently without value or meaning. However I do see that exact sentiment expressed by many corporatists, who privilege corporations and their 'rights' above actual people and civil society. And especially from members of the far-right, who are all too willing to dehumanize…

Under anarchism wouldn't the right just form a block to dehumanize the other? Wouldn't there just be a far-right solidarity group and nothing changes?

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#69

Post by mr_spothawk » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 6:25 AM UTC

abiox wrote: post #60

mr_spothawk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the scale of society I see Marxism as just as important. what'd I just read? I think it was something like "100 million people died in the 20th century" because Marxism [1] > How to make a political program out of anarchism? nah bruh... the article is explicit: > We are anti-political because we are interested in the self-organization of the power of individuals. This tension towards self-organization is complet…

the 100 million meme seems like such lame propaganda. when stalin starved ukraine, were those deaths "because of communism"?

well.. Stalinism is a subset of Socialism, i guess. [1]

and i don't know anything but lame propaganda, so i'm left to ask wikipedia about the starvation pieces too:

> Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Re: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)

#70

Post by the_cyber_pass » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 6:25 AM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #52

mattmaroon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't take things because they need them. They take things because it's a biological imperative. Lack of scarcity won't change the nature of an animal whose psyche is the product of millions of years of scarcity.

Evo-psych arguments are always weak, but this one would work slightly better if it were focused on violence rather than property. It isn't as if Homo sapiens evolved in an environment of flatscreen televisions and automobiles. A Neolithic tribe "owned" a couple of arrowheads and a big flat rock for cracking nuts. If they lost those they'd presumably just get some more. More to the point, we didn't evolve in an enviro…

Just to comment on this. A common google search would have pointed out that your ideas about local police forces are largely incorrect. Police have been a thing for much longer. The big thing that happened in more recent history (Meaning 1700s) is separating them from the private market, the military or unregulated local mobs. You can trace the enforcers of civil law through force all the way back to ancient Babylon because civil unrest is bad for raising taxes. You could argue this were not police but rather various forms of 'authority,' but it's dishonest to say that they were not acting like police.

Easy example of this would be Cohortes Urbanae in ancient Rome which was specifically formed because the Praetorian Guard was too corrupt even by Roman standards at the time and mobs, gangs and 'random' violence were common.