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I don't think anarchism is necessarily "get rid of leadership" - it can be more like "share leadership." In other words, to do this well, you must recognise and

by laurex 2y ago

I don't think anarchism is necessarily "get rid of leadership" - it can be more like "share leadership." In other words, to do this well, you must recognise and dismantle coercive structures and dominance. This of course takes work, but skipping over this work in favour of "output" type work has led to a great deal of output without consideration of consequences. If we learn to be leaders in a context of power-sharing, there's not necessarily a conflict in that power's expansion, though it's hard to make that legible in a world where power is regarded as a resource subject to scarcity.

dingnuts 2y ago
it's not possible to dismantle dominance structures. They're evolutionarily defined in our biology and are primordial. If you ban explicitly stated dominance hierarchies, they merely become implicit. Think about "flat" organizations. On paper, there is no power hierarchy. In reality, you have to join the group and observe to discover who is actually in power, because it's implicit, but there is always someone in power. This is then lamented as "politics." There is no evidence that implicit power structures, especially ones where everyone maintains the lie that there is no power structure at all, are better than explicitly defined power structures. In fact, history presents lots of evidence to the contrary, especially if you read Russian!
- laurex 2y ago
  Dominance is a strategy among the ones we have evolved to employ, but it's not accurate to say it is "wired in" as the primary and inescapable strategy. At least as I understand it, anarchism does not deny our impulses to dominance exist, rather it seeks to put that tendency in check through processes of collaboration and checks to individual power. As soon as you begin introducing an argument that is about states or organziations, it becomes a little muddy, since at least in theory, anarchism is playing a different game, but there are examples even in our current era of rampantly dominant structures of this working at scale. For example, the 12-step programs are designed in such a way that their governance works by essentially anarchist, collectivist principles, and there are millions of people participating in them.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    >but it's not accurate to say it is "wired in" as the primary and inescapable strategy. The issue is it is an effective strategy. You have to actively control it from taking over. The vast majority of the population must be inoculated against using dominance and to stamp it out, which again comes down to "who is going to teach them that and ensure these teachings don't get corrupted". Saying that unimportant things like 12-step programs use this is pretty useless. While some individuals may have high stakes in these programs, for most people there is no stake at all. If your local chapter fails under a brutal dictator you can just go to another one. The rate of failure like this won't even be documented. When someone says fuck your checks and balances in your government it's a different story you're in grave danger, and by watching the news now, I don't think many people are willing to do much about it at all.
    - panarky 2y ago
      > unimportant things like 12-step programs Hundreds of millions of people have participated in programs like this. That's a lot of people to experience first-hand how it's possible to accomplish good things through decentralization, voluntary association, lack of hierarchy, mutual aid and community-driven governance. That doesn't seem "unimportant" to me, but perhaps it would be easier to see the effectiveness of anarchist principles at work in a different domain, such as open-source software development.
- AndyNemmity 2y ago
  There is nothing biological about the modern corporation. It can be different, as it was in Spain. That's the point. Identifying unjustified authority, and replacing it.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I think one has to admit the possibility that a shared leadership model is simply at a competitive disadvantage. Looking to biology, there are advantages to specialized brains and central nervous systems. Organisms without centralization abound, but rarely in direct competition with animals. They tend to exist in separate niches and compete with each other.
lukan 2y ago
"I don't think anarchism is necessarily "get rid of leadership"" No, but many anarchists simply say so. No political power for anyone. And yet there are/were many anarchists leaders. For many anarchists this is not a problem, if the leadership is voluntarily followed. For others it is a temporary solution at best. So the result is constant debates and nothing gets done. So not that surprising, why anarchism has not much mainstream appeal. It is not at all a consistent ideology. The words anarchism are anti themself - a negation of hierachy. But what is a hierachy? What is "good" leadership? Not clear. So some anarchistic schools of thought might have a more consistent model, of how to do things, anarcho-syndicalism seems to be one. But in the end, it gets mixed up with everything else. How can that be convincing for the masses?
- orwin 2y ago
  Makhno's Platformism came to mind, and it was convincing enough for an armed guerrilla to: - get rid of Germany after Lenin's betrayal - Beat Russian loyalist, the white Army (I want to say Denikine but it could be a man with a name in -ov like Shalov), inflicting twice as Manu casualties - kept Lenin's army (lead by Trotsky? I think, but I might have it mixed up with Kronstad) in check for years as bullets and men got rarer, until defeat.
  - lukan 2y ago
    Yes, I heard about them, but I also heard that their organisation was not at all free of hierachies, so many anarchists do not consider them anarchists. They were people with weapons - taking what they needed for their fight. So some claim they were democratically legitimized, but the farms where they just took the horses and food from, could not really disagree - as the machnoists had the weapons. And they used it. But most details seems to have been lost and it is hard getting accurate accounts. Those I read, were quite bloody and brutal. So all in all probably less brutal then the accounts of the white and red army, but not really up to the standards of "voluntarily" and "equality" like anarchisms wants to be.

by laurex 2y ago

dingnuts 2y ago

it's not possible to dismantle dominance structures. They're evolutionarily defined in our biology and are primordial. If you ban explicitly stated dominance hierarchies, they merely become implicit. Think about "flat" organizations. On paper, there is no power hierarchy. In reality, you have to join the group and observe to discover who is actually in power, because it's implicit, but there is always someone in power. This is then lamented as "politics." There is no evidence that implicit power structures, especially ones where everyone maintains the lie that there is no power structure at all, are better than explicitly defined power structures. In fact, history presents lots of evidence to the contrary, especially if you read Russian!

laurex 2y ago
Dominance is a strategy among the ones we have evolved to employ, but it's not accurate to say it is "wired in" as the primary and inescapable strategy. At least as I understand it, anarchism does not deny our impulses to dominance exist, rather it seeks to put that tendency in check through processes of collaboration and checks to individual power. As soon as you begin introducing an argument that is about states or organziations, it becomes a little muddy, since at least in theory, anarchism is playing a different game, but there are examples even in our current era of rampantly dominant structures of this working at scale. For example, the 12-step programs are designed in such a way that their governance works by essentially anarchist, collectivist principles, and there are millions of people participating in them.
- pixl97 2y ago
  >but it's not accurate to say it is "wired in" as the primary and inescapable strategy. The issue is it is an effective strategy. You have to actively control it from taking over. The vast majority of the population must be inoculated against using dominance and to stamp it out, which again comes down to "who is going to teach them that and ensure these teachings don't get corrupted". Saying that unimportant things like 12-step programs use this is pretty useless. While some individuals may have high stakes in these programs, for most people there is no stake at all. If your local chapter fails under a brutal dictator you can just go to another one. The rate of failure like this won't even be documented. When someone says fuck your checks and balances in your government it's a different story you're in grave danger, and by watching the news now, I don't think many people are willing to do much about it at all.
  - panarky 2y ago
    > unimportant things like 12-step programs Hundreds of millions of people have participated in programs like this. That's a lot of people to experience first-hand how it's possible to accomplish good things through decentralization, voluntary association, lack of hierarchy, mutual aid and community-driven governance. That doesn't seem "unimportant" to me, but perhaps it would be easier to see the effectiveness of anarchist principles at work in a different domain, such as open-source software development.
AndyNemmity 2y ago
There is nothing biological about the modern corporation. It can be different, as it was in Spain. That's the point. Identifying unjustified authority, and replacing it.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

I think one has to admit the possibility that a shared leadership model is simply at a competitive disadvantage. Looking to biology, there are advantages to specialized brains and central nervous systems. Organisms without centralization abound, but rarely in direct competition with animals. They tend to exist in separate niches and compete with each other.

lukan 2y ago

"I don't think anarchism is necessarily "get rid of leadership"" No, but many anarchists simply say so. No political power for anyone. And yet there are/were many anarchists leaders. For many anarchists this is not a problem, if the leadership is voluntarily followed. For others it is a temporary solution at best. So the result is constant debates and nothing gets done. So not that surprising, why anarchism has not much mainstream appeal. It is not at all a consistent ideology. The words anarchism are anti themself - a negation of hierachy. But what is a hierachy? What is "good" leadership? Not clear. So some anarchistic schools of thought might have a more consistent model, of how to do things, anarcho-syndicalism seems to be one. But in the end, it gets mixed up with everything else. How can that be convincing for the masses?

orwin 2y ago
Makhno's Platformism came to mind, and it was convincing enough for an armed guerrilla to: - get rid of Germany after Lenin's betrayal - Beat Russian loyalist, the white Army (I want to say Denikine but it could be a man with a name in -ov like Shalov), inflicting twice as Manu casualties - kept Lenin's army (lead by Trotsky? I think, but I might have it mixed up with Kronstad) in check for years as bullets and men got rarer, until defeat.
- lukan 2y ago
  Yes, I heard about them, but I also heard that their organisation was not at all free of hierachies, so many anarchists do not consider them anarchists. They were people with weapons - taking what they needed for their fight. So some claim they were democratically legitimized, but the farms where they just took the horses and food from, could not really disagree - as the machnoists had the weapons. And they used it. But most details seems to have been lost and it is hard getting accurate accounts. Those I read, were quite bloody and brutal. So all in all probably less brutal then the accounts of the white and red army, but not really up to the standards of "voluntarily" and "equality" like anarchisms wants to be.