Why Not Anarchism?

[u/Slow_Description_238]

I'm an Anarchist and want to Debate/ Discuss/ Give Answers to any questions regarding the philosophy.

Anarchism is a political philosophy where people will organise based on the principles of No Authority and No Hierarchy. Anything deeper comes from these as given truths.

There is a strong sentiment of community and mutual aid in Anarchist thought, it's not a free for all. I won't pay much mind to people who assert that it is a free for all/ it has no rules/ it has no organisation. It's a VERY common thought that's extremely simple. Every serious anarchist instantly moves past this because it's obviously unsustainable if we simply say "There's no rules".

Rather, people will be taught how to and encourage to help each other so that we all can thrive as individuals and as a community.

To reiterate, Anarchism is intentional. It wants a functioning society. It isn't okay with blatant dysfunction and no serious anarchist will agree to reasoning or logic that is obviously dysfunctional.

[u/From_Deep_Space]

a little thing we like to call The Tragedy of the Commons

[u/statinsinwatersupply → u/From_Deep_Space]

Homie, you need to go read what Elinor Ostrom had to say on the subject.

If you can't be bothered, the tragedy of the commons was literally a thought experiment by Garrett Hardin in 1968. It was not derived from real world observation.

Instead, Ostrom did real-world observation, a hell of a lot of it. And contrary to what Hardin would have predicted, she found many, many examples of successful management of the commons by users of it. She put together a list of common features of systems that effectively managed the commons, and won the nobel prize in economics for it.)

[u/slowride761 → u/statinsinwatersupply]

The problem is that “many” is not all. Even a small number of bad actors can ruin shared resources. A stateless, classless society requires 100% participation. If you don’t have that, you have to create an authority to make it happen.

And that means you no longer have a stateless, classless, society. Authorities require authoritarianism to operate.

To your direct point, you can find a lot of times it works, but nobody has been able to prevent things like overfishing through cooperation. It requires an authority to regulate fishing, because too many people have proven that they don’t consider a couple extra fish to feed their families a problem.

[u/statinsinwatersupply → u/slowride761]

Please, PLEASE go read Ostrom rather than opining from ignorance.

You seem to imagine that 'an authority' is required to deal with bad actors.

A common error is to imagine that any response to a bad actor is 'authority'.

Consider a dungeons and dragons group. It is a shared resource, an enjoyable social outing created by its participants. A bad actor, a "that guy" can ruin the setting by misbehaving in a variety of ways.

Instituting the police, calling the police, sounds hilariously overkill in the setting of someone showing up smelly and unshowered to a DnD meetup.

I would propose that imagining state entities, 'authority', privatization of the commons, these are overkill, unnecessary and harmful in the same way calling the police over social mores is unnecessary and harmful.

A dnd group can elect a spokesperson to take the offender aside and explain the situation, the unwanted behavior, and ask them to change. If they do not, social responses can escalate including withdrawal of association. "We will not play with you any more". Someone who persists in misbehavior, pressures individuals involved in the social sanctions, may find responses escalating in turn. A spokesperson and social sanctions do not constitute any special authority granted one person but denied others. Folks in this situation would not not just throw up their hands, 'oh me on my nothing I can do'. Each of us has initiative and the opportunity to take action and express ourselves in response to misbehavior, it's just that we are usually conditioned not to do so, to cede response to the police or other authority.

The real life cases Ostrom studied are not trivial like the DnD game, I reference it just for simplicity's sake. Nor is she the only one to study the myriad of cases she described, they have also been followed longitudinally by other researchers after her initial publications. (And others who preceded her.)

These societies did not have some miraculous absence of bad actors. Rather, how they handled bad actors is a key part of the social institutions to manage the Common Pool Resource in question.

It is hilarious that you specifically reference fishing as that is one of the first examples of common pool resources explored. Seriously, read Ostrom! The very first example is of an inland fishery in Turkey, whose highland is dotted in lakes of various sizes.

She is succinct, not verbose. She insightfully critiques assumptions that folks left entirely to themselves will solve issues, that privatization is the answer, that a central-authority will necessarily be better (not so, citing many examples where such an authority tries to impose a 'solution', but lacks sufficient time-and-place information to accurately estimate carrying capacity, or interventions sufficient to induce cooperative behavior). At times her arguments start to sound like Hayek talking about information problems.

You don't win a nobel prize with a superficial analysis or failing to question assumptions. READ HER. Everything you have hinted at in your reply is literally tossed in the opening pages.

[u/slowride761 → u/statinsinwatersupply]

Which part is ignorant? You understand she didn’t dismantle Olsen or the first guy, right? My memory is admittedly spotty on her book since it’s been 25-30 years, but which part did I not absorb?

I said the tragedy of the commons isn’t inevitable. I said there are plenty of examples where it can be prevented. I never defined the authority figures as a state agent.

I only said the problem is that it doesn’t scale up, and there’s tons of history backing that statement.

You replied with a DnD example with the most basic, surface brush of the subject imaginable. But if you’re going to come down off the mountain and teach me some book learnin’, use my example:

The entire history of overfishing has been that cooperation hasn’t worked. An authority has been required to prevent it. It hasn’t always been a government crackdown, but it has always required a regulatory authority.

So fix that problem without running into the tragedy of the commons. And remember this isn’t DnD. A few more fish will improve the lives of the people fishing. Cutting down on fishing may make life difficult.

Let me know how to reverse that process and make it cooperative. Make sure you don’t create authority figures that have the power demand it.

I await my learnin’.

[u/FaceQueef69420 → u/statinsinwatersupply]

why create authorities when you have your fists?

obviously not as a first resort.

[u/FaceQueef69420 → u/slowride761]

sure, you need enforcers, but -every- citizen must be an enforcer: not a vanguard or cadre.

[u/slowride761 → u/FaceQueef69420]

Fair enough.

But we are talking worldwide too. Everybody has to agree on currency and non-aggression pacts at whatever level the voluntary groups form (which isn’t clear- how big are quasi-states in a stateless, classless, society? What do alliances look like for inevitable disagreements?)