Just a topic to chat about.
I would love to live in an anarchist society! I just don’t know how to get there, it seems like to many people prefer the current situation. And I also want everyone to be able to live as they please. Maybe if things get bad enough under capitalism, but it feels like most people will jump on the other side and the far right will benefit from it.
I would take significant cultural change, the kind of change capitalists will do their damnedest to prevent. People have to first believe a world not based on mutual exploitation is even possible.
But how do we convince others of this?
Or stop them from shitting up river from us if they don’t feel like stopping.
It’s been awhile since I read this so I’m going to mess up the details so I apologize. But I believe it was in the book Debt the first 5000 years that David Graeber shares a story from an African tribe that he had an account of.
In this tribe it was custom that if someone remarked on something or asked for something that the people of the village were obligated to give it to the asker. And there was a man in this tribe who every day would go to the fisher and comment on the best fish they had caught so if course the fisherman were obligated to give it to him. And then he’d visit the weavers and comment on the best basket they had. And so on and so forth up and down the coast he would do this and everyone knew who he was and that he would do this and the merchants got upset and got together to decide what to do. Custom says they cannot refuse him when he asks so they concluded that there was only one logical and egalitarian thing left to do. And so they formed a mob and killed the guy.
So what do you do if someone is shitting up stream and won’t stop? First you try talking to them. If that doesn’t work then you get your union to talk to their federation to pressure them into cooperating. And if all else fails then we fight to protect our health and our way of life. Anarchism isn’t pacifism. We can protect ourselves from those who will destroy our way of life and oppress others.
That’s not the question, though. There will always be imbalances of power. Transitioning to a “nonhierarchical” society just ends up with a bunch of power dynamics festering while no one talks about them because they’re not supposed to exist. Obviously there’s such a thing as too much concentrated power, but having spent fairly significant time in contexts where people believe there’s no hierarchy, I like my hierarchies out where I can see them, rather than waiting to stab me from the shadows.
Plus, there’s the warlord problem: Other people don’t stop using hierarchy just because you do.
If the state were to suddenly disappear, yes, I’d agree with you. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, most of that without a state, and with many groups living in what were likely arguably something like anarcho-communist societies (check out The Dawn Of Everything from David Graeber). Warlords are a symptom of a power vacuum.
Cultural slaves need support, time, and healing before anything close to freedom can happen. They will immediately go insane and reforge their chains.
Oh, days old post that died. oops
