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Looking at the closing para... > Now, you might object that all this is well and good as a way for small groups of people to get on with each other, but managi
by bell-cot 3y ago
Looking at the closing para...
> Now, you might object that all this is well and good as a way for small groups of people to get on with each other, but managing a city, or a country, is an entirely different matter. And of course there is something to this. Even if you decentralize society and put as much power as possible in the hands of small communities, there will still be plenty of things that need to be coordinated, from running railroads to deciding on directions for medical research. But just because something is complicated does not mean there is no way to do it democratically. It would just be complicated. In fact, anarchists have all sorts of different ideas and visions about how a complex society might manage itself. To explain them though would go far beyond the scope of a little introductory text like this. Suffice it to say, first of all, that a lot of people have spent a lot of time coming up with models for how a really democratic, healthy society might work; but second, and just as importantly, no anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.
...and comparing it to Wikipedia's take...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy
...I'm thinking that the article is actually advocating for an idyllic version of small-government democracy. Not anarchy.
- Synaesthesia 3y agoAnarchy does not mean absence of organisation. It means absence of unfair dominance and control of one over another. An anarchist society could be highly organised, in all kinds of ways people decide to.
- bell-cot 3y agoAt least on-line, the definitions I'm seeing are very heavy on the "there are no rulers / authorities / states / government" points. There ain't no "as long as it's fair" escape clauses. Small-scale, if well-behaved people are the vast majority, and there are easy ways to cut out the occasional bad actor - that can work very well. Just look at the Internet of the 1970's and 1980's. Larger scale, with a real-world mix of human behaviors, and cutting off the "wrong sort" far more difficult - OOPS. Look at the modern internet, and the many toxic actors and organizations that have explosively grown in the large-scale anarchy. EDIT: Add "no big rewards for becoming dominant" to my preconditions for anarchy working well. You for-sure could not have gotten Zuckerbucks-grade rich by dominating the early internet.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoGraeber was anarchist but did work to make it palatable to liberal minded readers. Graeber doesn’t advocate for hierarchy. If you want examples of how the O of the Anarchy symbol could work and maybe did work in our human past, as organizations without hierarchy, see Dawn of Everything